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Tag: Memorials

  • How Yoko Ono and Vintage Sounds Influenced Memorials on All Clouds Bring Not Rain

    Memorials Press Photo David Masters
    Photo: David Masters

    There’s a well-known photo of Yoko Ono from 1967 where the artist is holding a glass hammer. If you live in Los Angeles, you’ve probably seen the image recently in connection with the Music of the Mind exhibition that’s currently at The Broad. English duo Memorials caught sight of that photo when the Yoko Ono retrospective showed at London’s Tate Modern and it ended up inspiring their song, “Cut Glass Hammer,” from the recently-released album All Clouds Bring Not Rain. 

    “We went to that exhibition and on the posters they have the picture of her with the glass hammer,” Verity Susman recalls on a recent video call. “They don’t have it in the actual exhibition, but that concept really stuck out in our minds.” In fact, Susman says, there was a lot about the Yoko Ono exhibition that seeped into the subconscious as she and Matthew Simms worked on the album- like the artist’s instructions and her references to nature- and may have manifested as subtle influences that they didn’t realize until looking back at photos from the Tate Modern after finishing the album. 

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  • Beatique Mix June 2026

    For the June Beatique mix, I decided that I would just play music for an hour or so and post the results whether or not I flubbed any airbreaks or mixes. The whole point of that is that I think it’s really important to keep the imperfections as a sign that there’s a real person making stuff for no real reason other than to just do it. We’ve been in this creepy, brand-centric cycle of culture for so long, where everything we share is supposed to function as a commercial for the next hustle, and it’s really easy to forget that we should do things just for the hell of it. DJing is my job- or, one of my jobs- but I also listen to a lot music because I like it. And sometimes I work out sets at home because I want to know how to songs fit together. It’s kind of practice, but it’s also just kind of how my brain has worked since before I realized that DJing was a job that I could do. 

    Even though this was made on the fly, there’s a flow to it. A lot of the songs relate to each other in ways that won’t make much sense to anyone who isn’t me. The first part is mostly related to stories I recently wrote or am in the middle of writing. The second half is club stuff, although not all of the songs have made it into my club sets yet. None of them are transitions that I’ve practiced prior to recording this. I’m just kind of figuring them out here. (The Angelé/Justice song and the Slayyyter one I played in reverse order the previous night and, tbh, I prefer that flow.) This is all background stuff that nobody really cares about, but, whatever. We’re living in the dead internet era and I have no illusions that anyone is actually reading or listening. But, because it helps me think things through, I made an annotated set list with links back to references. 

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