This talk is from WIRED by Design, a two-day live magazine event that celebrated all forms of creative problem solving.
YACHT has a holistic view of what it means to be a band. Music is just part of the Los Angeles-based pop duo's project--the group's equally obsessed with how that's music packaged and presented. "We often consider how a song will look before we've even done settling on how it sounds," says Claire L. Evans, the group's lead singer.
At WIRED by Design, YACHT talked about their song "Where Does This Disco?" Where you hear a catchy electro-pop tune, the duo saw a chance to explore "the decaying role of physical media in the buying and selling of music," as Evans puts it. It took the form of a compact disc unlike any other. The art plays off familiar CD iconography. As for the media itself, YACHT settled on an obscure type of CD---a "minimax" disc, which suspends a three-inch CD inside a full-size clear platter. In the tiny text on the inner rim of the CD, the band printed a hidden message: "The compact disc is dead! Long live the compact disc!"
All this attention to detail adds up to a thorough exploration of a medium fast on its way to obsolescence. "For a lot of people, a CD is no longer an object of value in and of itself," Evans says. "It's more like a place where digital music is temporarily imprisoned." With "Where Does This Disco?" YACHT proves there's still plenty of interesting stuff you can do with that physical container. For more, check out the site YACHT built to accompany its presentation.
