Memos is loosely related to a series of five essays by Italo Calvino, titled Six Memos for the Next Millennium. Composer Erik Lund found this work to be a fascinating read, and he felt that meaningful analogies could be made to sound and music. Erik Lund composes music as analogies and commentaries. As such, his works are usually born of ideas and sources that are not inherently musical, where he takes as his task the process of transforming these ideas into the sound domain. The result has been music which has been described as "dramatic and gripping" (Martin Adams, Irish Times). Erik Lund is professor of music composition at the University of Illinois, a composer of acoustic and electroacoustic music, and an active performer of both composed and improvised music. His compositions have won the League of Composers, International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM) and ASCAP composition competitions, and he has received grants for his work from the Musik Biennale-Berlin Festival, Meet the Composer, ASCAP, the Illinois Arts Council, and the Research Board of the University of Illinois.