On the heels of one of the biggest music festivals in the country, YACHT's Claire L. Evans ripped into the Austin-based South By Southwest Festival Sunday night -- and also talked about paranormal activity elsewhere in the Lone Star state.
"It's awful," Evans, one-half of the indie dance duo YACHT, told NiteSide at the Brainwave lecture at Chelsea's Rubin Museum of Art last night where she slammed the music fest.
"It's really like the worst way to experience music and the worst way to play music in these like very high stress, very short window opportunities ... with such a constant low-level background rock-and-roll sound happening all around you."
She added, "Usually South By Southwest is such a nightmare. At the same time it’s like being thrown into the fire and it’s kind of fun to make what’s best of it and try to live through it and do a good job. I think that’s we did this year.”
Evans flew into town Sunday morning to participate in the evening discussion about extraterrestrial life with astrophysicist Fred C. Adams. She revealed the band has been strongly influenced by its experience in another part of Texas.
“A couple of years ago, we witnessed this paranormal optical phenomenon in the desert called the Marfa Mystery Lights,” said Evans. “At the risk of sounding New Age, it really reorganized our world view.”
The band once lived in Marfa and plan to visit the town before embarking on a European tour this spring.
“We go back there a lot now," Evans said. "Just the experience of living side by side with something completely mystical and paranormal like that. It’s something that plugs us back into the greater unknowable, indifferent magic of the universe on a regular basis.”
