Watch Now → The Computer Accent

Our documentary is out now; our thoughts on AI in 2024.

You can now rent or buy The Computer Accent on Apple TV and Amazon. It’s been a long, strange road for this film, a feature documentary about the making of our album Chain Tripping. We decided to make an album using AI in 2016; shooting started when we began work on the album in 2017—that’s a century in AI years.

This was the state of AI in 2017: no ChatGPT, no Midjourney, no DALL-E, no employees at companies with the title “prompt engineer.” No text-to-audio, no text-to-video. No consumer tools; no AI baked into Photoshop. There wasn’t anything that could generate usable audio at all. This ended up being a blessing: forced to collaborate with people way outside of our social scenes, we worked with technologists to build and edit custom models, and tapped research scientists to guide us through using open-source research tools that were maddeningly incomprehensible. Everything was built for coders, not artists.

At the very beginning of this process, a guy from a corny AI music startup told us that his platform could cook up a new YACHT album in two hours. Can you imagine? For the sake of the film, we tried it. It could not. Instead, it took us the better part of two years to figure out how to make an AI record we’d feel good putting our name on. Although it would have been easier, and probably more fun, to wild out and make some AI noise experiment, our goal was always to actually make a YACHT record. Something that sounded like us—and not like software.

To achieve that, we leaned more collage than cutting-edge. Rather than generate sounds and voices, we generated MIDI (computer sheet music) and lyrics. We had to use different tools for each piece of the process, coming up with hacks and workarounds to generate notes, patterns, and words independently from one other, before painstakingly arranging all those fragments into songs, wrapping our bodies around those songs, and performing them in the studio.

Your favorite band at a 2022 screening of The Computer Accent at 2220 Arts + Archives in Los Angeles.

All of this was probably hard for our nice documentarians to dramatize. But they managed to wrestle an esoteric process—along with interviews, AI explainers, and a taste of 20 years of YACHT history—into a great movie. The Computer Accent world-premiered in Copenhagen at the CPH:Dox Festival in 2022. It’s spent the last few years on a festival tour around the world, playing in France, Mexico, Sweden, Germany, the Czech Republic, Taiwan, the Netherlands, the UK, and more. It had a weeklong run in New York at Metrograph. We toured it up the West Coast, screening it in art museums, theaters, and rock clubs. It even screened at the Sydney Opera House. Now it’s debuting on the small screen of your choice!

Very special shoutout to the film's core crew: director-producers Sebastian Pardo and Riel Roch-Decter, and editor-shooter-everything man Brandon Winters. One time Riel tried to pitch this movie to a studio and the executive told him it'd be a great idea if it was about Kanye instead. They still stuck with us.

Is now the right time? It never is. The public attitude towards AI has been swinging back and forth between cringy boosterism and righteous indignation ever since we started this project, so figuring out when to release this film widely has been confusing at best. 2019 was too early. 2024 might still be too early, or too late. And even if it’s just right, it’s not going to be just right for everyone. Either way, we’re glad we made this album how and when we did. Pushing ourselves to find something beautiful and meaningful within such a constrained and unintuitive framework was an incredible creative challenge, and we’re grateful there’s a whole movie to explain a process that’s not likely to ever be replicated.

We never want to be the kinds of artists who avoid taking risks, for fear of looking dumb in the rearview. We’re not really interested in AI anymore, but we stand by the ultimate message of this film, and of this project, which is that tools alone won’t get you anywhere. The interesting part of any creative process is trying to figure out how to get the tools to do what you want—all while avoiding being defined or identified by those tools. It’s always a battle, whether you’re working with Artificial Intelligence or a dumb ol’ paintbrush.

Watch it, share it, and ask us questions in the chat!

Oh, and if you’re not in the US, you can stream The Computer Accent directly from the filmmakers’ website here.

xo
YACHT

PS - Our new, AI-free single, Eve Babitz, is out now on all streaming platforms. If you like it for free, you’ll love it for $7 on Bandcamp, and you’ll go nuts for the 3D Risograph print of the artwork.