Any Fishtown folkie, West Philly MC or No Libs indie kid will tell you: No band is an island.

Everybody knows everybody. Everybody has played with everybody. Or produced 'em or jammed with 'em or lent 'em an amp, a turntable, an ear.

Once in a while, this can be a bad thing. So many cliques, clubs and collectives. So many backs to slap, scratch and stab. And don't ever piss off a booker in this town. They're all petty, vengeful psychos. (JK! Haha! BFF!)

But mostly this interconnectedness is right on. It's something like a network, or a series of them. Small support systems artists can rely on.

For this issue, we asked our writers to go out and look for the glue, the people who hold the little scenes together with skill, friendships, persistence and serendipity. The enablers, the collaborators, the wingmen who also make time for their own art. The ones who work well with others.

You know the kinds of people we're talking about. The Jazzy Jeffs, McTears, Treeces, Plain Parades and Rootses. We've been covering those guys for years. We wanted to dig a little deeper.

Take MC Flipside and DJ Skipmode, for instance. They've been teaming up for a decade under the name Electric City. And when they're not making beats and rhyming, they're making room for their peers on the Hip-Hop Lives stage at Tritone every month. Ten years is a long time. Given Skip's work with the Illvibe Collective and Flip's tendency to run all over town playing hip-hop history professor, there's a good chance you've walked in on one of their gigs. Next month, they're dropping their first CD, Everything Everywhere All the Time.

And how about Slo-Mo? After fronting Philly's roots rock legends The Low Road, Mike Brenner has lent his lap-steel and production skills to locals like Marah and The Donuts and notable outsiders like Magnolia Electric Co. and Songs: Ohia. And now, after a few years in the shadows, he's revived and reinvented his bluesy Slo-Mo project as a hip-hop fusion with Mic Wrecka.

And so on.

This isn't the story of Philly music's Grand Unified Theory. We're not mapping the Philly genome, connecting all the bands, MCs and DJs in a flowchart the size of the Schuylkill. (We've got our top guys on that project, but we're years away from a breakthrough.)

This is the story of little nuclei, small hubs of positive energy pulling people together, leaning and being leaned on, and making their own music in the process.

Within

Slo-Mo
A.D. Amorosi finds out how the man with the Lap of Steel ended up making a hip-hop record. [Link]

Devin Greenwood
Fishtown's most wanted wingman talks to John Vettese about finally making his own music. [Link]

GeoClan
M.J. Fine investigates a music/arts/everything collective born of friendship and ideals. [Link]

Electric City
Deesha Dyer asks Skip and Flip about a decade of collaboration. [Link]

Girls' DJ Collective
Think Rock School, but with better music. M.J. Fine talks shop with founder/DJ Rashida Holmes. [Link]

Local CD Reviews
New plastic from Kindred, Kate Gaffney, Twin Atlas, Jneiro Jarel, Torsion and pals. [Link]