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DJ Appreciation Post – Matt Fish host of CrossCurrents

January 21, 2025 - 7:00 pm

A graphic of a DJ appreciation post for Matt Fish in brown, green, and white. There is a circle with a photo of a man wearing a hat and glasses outside with trees covered in moss behind him making a neutral face. Matt Fish

Join us every Thursday for CrossCurrents at 7pm on 91.3 KBCS brought to you by Matt Fish. Thank you, Matt for bringing diverse programming to public radio at KBCS and broadening the horizons of our listeners in the Puget sound region. Matt told us about the origin story of CrossCurrents, his upbringing, how he discovered world music, his work in film, and the inspiration for CrossCurrents.

CrossCurrents Origin

Matt began co-hosting CrossCurrents with his old friend Andrew Stauffer in February of 2021. While roommates during their college days in Boston in the early-90s, they embarked on a musical journey around the world that continues today, thirty years later, here in Seattle. Due to growing time commitments with family, work, and music, Andrew is no longer a regular host for CrossCurrents but will still appear from time to time in the future.

Life, Education, and Career

Matt had a musical childhood, studying violin and singing opera at the Met in New York City. He attended Interlochen Arts Academy in Michigan for high school, majoring in music and later, stage and film production. He continued his studies in Boston at the Museum School, focusing on film and photography.

After moving to Seattle in the mid-90s, Matt studied anthropology and ethnomusicology at the University of Washington and began what would be a decades-long study of Sabar drumming from Senegal, with master drummer Mapathé Diop. Matt relished taking a deep dive into a particular musical tradition, traveling to Senegal for further studies, and performing regularly in the Pacific Northwest with Mapathé and his group.

For the last twenty-five years Matt has worked in the film and video industry, primarily in the documentary, non-profit, and educational fields. He is the sole proprietor for his freelance business Matt Fish Media. He feels fortunate to live in an area where arts and culture are thriving and especially enjoys opportunities to combine his two great loves…music and the moving image.

Inspiration for CrossCurrents

The inspiration for the name CrossCurrents originally comes from a friendship Matt had in the early 90s with a librarian in Orem, Utah who appreciated Matt’s interest in roots music and shared a tape of a local radio show he produced in college called Crosscurrents. While it wasn’t strictly a “world music” show, it gave Matt a real appreciation for the value of sharing this kind of music on the radio.

Later in the nineties after moving to Seattle, Matt and Andrew were approached by the producer of one of the earliest internet radio stations called Antenna Internet Radio, or A.I.R., to create a show for international music. Drawing from their already extensive collection of roots music from around the world, they produced a weekly show called CrossCurrents which continued for several months.

Fast forward more than two decades to late 2020, when word went out at KBCS (where Andrew had taken over hosting the Grateful Dead show Backtracks), they were looking for ideas for new shows. Stuck at home during the height of the pandemic, it seemed like the perfect moment to revive CrossCurents for a new audience, especially at a time when people could really use to do some “armchair traveling”.

With an emphasis on how music travels the globe, crossing boundaries; as well as a grounding in the fields of ethnomusicology and anthropology, CrossCurrents aims to entertain, enlighten, and expose listeners to types of music they might never have heard before, or at least don’t hear very often on these American airwaves.

A Note from KBCS

Thank you, Matt for DJ’ing with KBCS and curating music for our community radio station!

A graphic of a DJ appreciation post for Matt Fish in brown, green, and white. There is a circle with a photo of a man wearing a hat and glasses outside with trees covered in moss behind him making a neutral face.

Matt Fish