‘We’d never been brought face-to-face with anything we couldn’t just Google’ — YACHT watches the skies.

Jona Bechtolt and Claire L. Evans, the two primary members of Portland electro dance-pop duo YACHT, travel the world in search of paranormal curiosities like a musical version of The X-Files’ Mulder and Scully. This interest in the extraterrestrial was set in motion in Marfa, Texas during the recording of the band’s latest full-length, See Mystery Lights. The LP gained its title after Bechtolt and Evans witnessed the city’s so-called “ghost lights,” a phenomenon involving glowing, floating basketball-sized spheres near U.S. Route 67.

“When we experienced that phenomenon, it inspired a lot of interest in us with the more esoteric elements of life and reality,” says Evans. “We got really into paranormal investigations, conspiracy theories, rituals, secret religions, secret societies, science fiction and all of these kinds of hyper-marginal psychedelic aspects of the human experience. They all feed into each other, and I feel it’s such an open and utopian way of understanding the world. We get a lot out of it musically.”

Adding further credence to the X-Files analogy, 25-year-old Evans is also a longtime writer and blogger on the topic of science fiction, regularly contributing to sites such as urbanhonking.com, good.is and sciencefiction.tumblr.com. As she describes it, sci-fi is her primary esthetic and artistic motivation in life, and the band’s experience in Marfa was a serious paradigm-shifter.

“It really blew us away, because we both come from a self-navigating, digital-information-seeking, myth-busting culture,” Evans says. “Before the ghost lights, we’d never been brought face-to-face with anything we couldn’t just Google and figure out what its deal was. It really rearranged our point of view and gave us a deeper respect for magic. We feel like that feeling is lost these days, so we want to embrace mystery as much as possible.”

That fascination with the paranormal isn’t the duo’s only controversial belief. During a 2009 interview with waferbaby.com, Bechtolt stated that he unashamedly uses pirated audio production software made by companies such as Audio Damage, Propellerheads and Ableton. Predictably, this escalated into a fiery online argument with much name-calling, threats of violence and the owner of Audio Damage labelling Bechtolt’s standards toward copyright as “rampant idiocy.” Online music magazine Pitchfork brought mass attention to the debate, calling it a “nerd flame war” while also describing it as “not terribly newsworthy.” So, did any of this ever leak into the real world?

“We were actually kind of worried it might, because the man that runs Audio Damage recently moved to Portland,” says Evans. “All signs point to him having a very unhinged personality, so we thought he might picket a YACHT concert or something like that, which would actually be awesome. But it never happened. Maybe that goes to show that people who say horrible things about other people on the Internet are not willing to back it up with physical confrontation, ever, because that’s not what it’s about.”

“We’re also happy to be the catalysts for a conversation about copyright, because it’s a very complicated issue,” she continues. “We don’t claim to have the solutions or that our way of doing things is the right way — of course not. It’s simply representative of the way many people are doing things right now. We’re just willing to be public about it instead of pretending our hard drives are as clean and virginal as a new computer. There aren’t many people in the world that can claim their hard drives have only kosher content. We paid for the software we got in trouble about, but let’s just leave it at that.”