Every Note is a Memory

WHEN I WAS in high school, I started collecting live-concert memorabilia—oversized t-shirts, posters, and autographs—to help me remember the experience. Then I started to notice that musicians often discarded their set lists at the end of each performance. Sometimes these were hastily written on whatever paper they had at hand, the back of car wash receipts or flight itineraries. Sometimes they were incomplete, maybe even illegible documents. But they always prompted their own set of memories. So I started collecting them. When I look, for example, on the set list from my last concert before COVID—The Shivas, at Polaris Hall—I hear not only the glorious energy of this surf rock outfit, but also the quiet uncertainty of the lockdowns and political unrest that was coming.

Many people have asked, “How do you get a set list?” Truth is, I try to arrive at a venue hours in advance to ask. Years ago, a member of The Rutabaga—a band from South Bend, Indiana—wrote their set list on the back of a rejection letter I’d recently received. (That rejection never looked quite the same.) The band CUP—consisting of Nels Cline (Wilco) and Yuka Honda (formerly of Cibo Matto)—played a set at Mississippi Studios in Portland without a list. Afterwards, I sheepishly asked Ms. Honda to write down some of their songs and she kindly obliged. I later photographed this list in a studio sitting on top of my childhood Casio keyboard as an homage to the synths she played on stage and a nod to the music I’d heard her play 20 years before.

Music has been the catalyst for some of my most important memories—of family, youthful exuberance, innocence, the challenges we all face. Every time I see live music I am filled with admiration and joy as I bear witness to the shared sights and sounds of the performance, and sometimes, if I am able, I add to a collection that attempts to document these moments, because it’s moments that grow into a life.

JOSÉ VELAZCO, UP’s digital lab coordinator, is an artist and educator whose works in film, photography, design, and sound attempt to harness memories.