Ten minutes into my conversation with Jona Bechtolt and Claire L. Evans, and YACHT is beginning to sound more and more like a religious cult.

“It's not religious and it's certainly not a cult”, say the Americans in an attempt to ease my concerns - but the seeds of doubt have already begun to germinate.

“This is just a band” we try to tell ourselves (as images of Waco come unnervingly to mind). “An innocent little electro pop duo from Portland, Oregon - like The Ting Tings but American”. We begin to calm down and realise that this is just a band - albeit one with a pretty well thought through ethos behind it. Except of course, that sentences like “We are just looking to build a new kind of community” and “We are just trying to set up something that is an alternative to church and an alternative to major religion” start getting thrown around and we feel ourselves beginning to worry again.
In truth, it's all rather innocent; slightly tongue in cheek and all part of the endearing quirkiness that is YACHT.

Currently the only two members of the band (“YACHT,” we're told, “is whatever YACHT is; whatever is right in front of you; so whoever gets up on stage can become part of YACHT - it's always growing and changing and evolving”) Bechtolt and Evans are, seemingly, as passionate about the philosophy that surrounds the band as they are the music itself.

“All the major religions have websites and stuff like that, but we are looking for a new way to talk to people directly,” continues Bechtolt of the YACHT philosophy. “We are trying to provide some sort of social community that isn't just like a social network of, you know, internet stuff for people who all like the colour red or whatever. I do not know how to explain it.”

Then Evans chips in: “Most music communities that are built around bands are based on very simple conceits like the fact that the people all enjoy the band, but that is just too self-centered for us.

“We do not want to have a music community that is based on just people being fans of our music. As much as that is appealing, it is not sustainable really, so we would like to give people other things to get interested in and opportunities that allow people to come towards YACHT for more than just music. We don't see ourselves as being that specialist. We want to be more general.”

This is may all sound rather deep and heavy going (you don't want to even get them started on that triangle which, incidentally, is extremely hard to typeset and threatens to provoke a small act of revenge by this publication’s sub editor), but we get the impression it's all quite playful in reality. If YACHT were really more concerned about creating a community than creating music, why would they have bothered to create such a mind-bendingly brilliant album?

Yes, See Mystery Lights is a bit of a gem and probably the best bit of electro pop we've heard since the first CSS record. There's something powerful and intoxicating about Evans' quasi-spoken-word vocals and Bechtolt's house and hip-hop influenced laptop beats. Melodies on songs like 'The Afterlife' and 'Psychic City' are as infectious as any of the synth-pop currently storming the charts by Little Boots or La Roux.

Recorded entirely in the isolated town of Marfa, Texas, where unexplained, multi-coloured lights (known as 'ghosts lights') have been spotted floating high in the air, the record is apparently a product of nothing other than the surroundings in which it was made - rather than any other musical influences.

Feeling an affinity with the town since hearing about the optical/paranormal phenomenon, Bechtolt felt the area would be the perfect setting to make a record and stopped off there to check it our before returning later with Evans.
“I first stopped there on a friend's recommendation that my mind would be blown if I went out to this desert,” he says. “It's completely isolated from anything else. It's six and a half hours from Austin and three and a half hours from El Paso.

“We were drawn there to be in isolation and to record an album there in isolation and we ended up being more sociable than we've ever been because the town is just vibrant and full of arty people and all kinds of people from all over the country and all over the world that have somehow taken this trip to see this crazy light show that exists there.
“So we were inspired by it. Not any other music or not by other influences from our childhood but directly by our immediate surroundings and by these weird mystery lights. It's a really weird, special place.”

Bechtolt's musical background is a surprising one. Starting out touring aged just thirteen (“I actually dropped out of high school before ever even attending a single lesson”) as the drummer in a punk duo with his older brother, he says he hasn't stopped since. He started YACHT, I'm told, as a reaction to a romantic break-up and - at first - it was very much a solo project.

“At that time I just wanted to completely isolate myself from human interaction,” he says, “so YACHT was born out of darkness and has moved towards the light. We still dabble in darkness from time to time, though, which is really important.”

Moving from a punk and rock ‘n’ roll background into electronic music, Bechtolt initially had problems finding an interesting way to interact with computers in a live setting in a way that would be visually interesting to an audience.
“It stared off with me putting the computer on the floor and kicking the computer around and really treating the computer like a rock instrument, and it moved on to just incorporating all different kinds of visual things like props and video projection and all that kind of stuff.”

Bechtolt met Evans in 2004 when Evans' noise rock band played a small gallery show alongside Bechtolt's former incarnation of YACHT. Having what they describe as an instant mutual interest in each other (rather than love at first sight), the pair soon met again through friends and became “romantically entwined”.

Nowadays, they say, they collaborate on “everything from breakfast to the band” and YACHT is firmly a duo - though this could change at any time, depending on just how many people decide to get up on stage with them when they come to London this month.