WA027 - Michaelangelo Matos’s 2005 Mix CD (‘Seattle Weekly,’ December 2025)

Looking and listening back, with a little wincing

When I took the music editor job at Seattle Weekly in 2003, I was returning, not arriving—I’d worked there previously as the music calendar editor a few years prior. One of the things I wanted to do, and did, was (a) to cover more than just indie rock, which was at that point chokingly hegemonic in both of the town’s alt-weeklies, and (b) to cover music the way people were actually listening to it, which was increasingly as MP3s on iPods and laptops. This meant I would ask writers to make mix CDs—the format offered a useful limit—and write about them. This baffled a lot of people, many of them in the Weekly’s ad department; I recall one executive on that side of the office asking if we were selling the mixes. No, that would be illegal—this was suggested listening, not product for sale. That only confused them more. Oh well—I was right, though I can see their consternation a little better from a distance. How do you sell ads to record labels and record shops when much of your coverage defaults to the iTunes Music Store?

The year-end issues were where I had the most fun with this format—we’d do a local-music double-CD for the cover story and then I’d ask the writers for their personal picks in the section itself. As mentioned before, I’ve been adding CDs to my listening rotation again of late; it helps break the cobwebs. Two of the discs I’ve played recently belonged in the same issue as what I’ve reprinted below (for paying subscribers, as always with Waves Around posts). They were made by Nate Patrin and Gavin Borchert (the paper’s classical critic), and they sound fantastic twenty-one years on. How about mine? You can find out for yourself below. I’ve added some bracketed comments where mete. It was stupid of me not to include the Go-Betweens’ “Finding You,” one of my genuine favorite songs. Oh well. Bon appetit.