Pickathon Playbacks

A living jukebox for the Artist Lodge

Every summer, Pickathon's stages hold performances worth remembering — and for years, a dedicated crew of volunteer photographers and audio engineers has made sure they are, quietly recording and preserving set after set. But an archive is only meaningful when people can actually interact with it.

For the 2026 festival, Sticky Culture partnered with the Lodge Crew to build a way to explore that archive. Together, we built Pickathon Playbacks: a crate-digging experience for the festival's own history, tucked into the Lodge where artists and backstage guests could browse and listen to decades of performances the way you'd flip through crates and listen to albums at a record store.

A visitor flips through record-style albums in a wooden crate mounted on a wall covered in Pickathon posters, with headphones and a listening station reading “place album to listen” beside it.

Our Approach

Nearly a hundred performances, spanning years of festival history across numerous stages, became physical "albums" with cover art, photos from the actual performance and quotes from the fans who were there. Bringing them together was a vast collaborative effort. The Lodge Crew conducted fan surveys to identify memorable performances from which we worked with the original photographers to source photos and live recording engineers to pick out favorite tracks.

Every piece was built from scratch over the run-up to the festival. We designed, prototyped and assembled the albums, custom furniture to house them and two listening stations to play them. The albums artwork was adhered over top donated album sleeves, echoing the festival's ethos of reuse and adding a tactility reminiscent of the crate-digging experience. Each contained a hidden NFC tag that the listening stations used to identify and play its track when slid into place. Visitors consistently described it as intuitive and a little magical: the physical, tactile act of crate-digging, paired with the immediacy of dropping a record onto a turntable.

Close-up of a hand-built listening station: a teal and green marbled surface on a wooden shelf labeled “place album to listen,” with headphones hanging beneath.

The Components

  • The crate. A browseable archive of performances meant to be dug through — not a museum case, a well-loved record collection.
  • The albums. Real cover photography and, on the back of each one, quotes from the fans who experienced that performance live.
  • The stations. Two hand-built listening stations, housing custom electronics and software, connected to sets of headphones. Set an album down, and playback starts.

Two visitors browse the album crates while a large album cover for Julia Jacklin’s 2017 “Lucky Barn” set sits active in the listening station.

Impact

The reactions came in fast, and they were personal. Artists spent their downtime browsing sets by other artists. Backstage guests spoke about it with real enthusiasm, telling friends and crew how impressed they were. One of the best moments: a child parked at a listening station, fully absorbed and flatly refusing every time their guardian floated the idea of moving on. And for the volunteer photographers and the recording crew who've shot and captured Pickathon for years, this was the first time their work became something someone could experience. Several told us how much that landed.

The numbers back up what we heard. Across the festival's four days, Playbacks logged more than 1,100 plays — a figure we checked against the raw event logs and filtered to exclude idle replay artifacts, so it reflects real listens, not noise. Visitors didn't gravitate to a handful of favorites: everything got pulled and played, nothing in the crate went undiscovered. Added together, there were roughly 30 hours of cumulative listening among festival goers. Engagement wasn't a one-time novelty, either — it held steady from early morning past midnight every single day, and spiked hardest on Saturday, the festival's biggest day, with 326 plays.

A handful of performances anchored especially deep engagement. Big Thief's 2017 set at Mt. Hood stage was most often pulled from the crates, followed by acts from Shakey Graves, Thee Oh Sees and Khruangbin. Listeners were glued to performances by Sgt. Papers, Elephant Revival and Taj Mahal, sticking all the way to the end on multiple occasions.

For a first-year prototype, that's the story: an archive that's usually seen by no one got opened up to everyone at the festival, and people didn't just glance at it — they dug all the way through the crate.

A wide view of the Pickathon Playbacks installation in the 2026 Artist Lodge: the poster-covered crate wall, two listening stations, and a visitor seated with headphones beneath the shade sails.