Amir Alexander has been banging out tracks for a wide variety of underground labels: Hakim Murphy’s Machining Dreams, Vanguard Sound, Spider and Lola’s Plan B Recordings, and now the debut release on the new label Argot out of Chicago called “Gutter Flex”. “Gutter Flex” lives up to its name, with grimy beats and basslines aplenty….

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Our man Scotty F has probably dropped more mixes for us than any of the people who actually write for ISM at this point. That doesn’t stop each one from being a special moment though, he is just that kind of deejay. Now that his web radio show Below the Green is in retirement, you…

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It’s going down in Pittsburgh tomorrow nite! This is gonna be a pretty awesome evening, with some of my favorite deejays playing on a killer four corner soundsystem at a venue with a nice sized dancefloor. ISM contributors Frank Glazer aka Count Zer0, Jwan Allen, and myself are joined by special guest and good friend…

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Since I am feeling very agitated by damn near every year-end list I’ve seen so far (with Little White Earbuds’ top tracks of 2011 list being by far the least offensive!), and my lack of RA contributions this year meaning I didn’t have to compile a list for them (giving me an easy copy and…

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This Friday night in Pittsburgh, we are celebrating the forthcoming release of our new Pittsburgh Track Authority 12″ on our own new label Pittsburgh Tracks with a big party! In addition to our own performance in conjunction with synth pop group TM EYE, we have a special opening performance from Shawn Rudiman that promises to…

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Despite only being around since 2010 (and the with vast majority of their releases having been this year), L.I.E.S or Long Island Electrical Systems has established itself as one of the most interesting dance music labels out there. Putting out fast paced sci-fi techno jams next to slow sample-based deep house grooves is what LIES…

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Today we kick off the week with a mix by a name that is probably pretty new to most of you: Jay Simon from Washington DC. I had the pleasure of meeting Jay earlier this year when he came up to Pittsburgh when Omar-S played here in January. I could tell that he knew what…

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The VIA festival was a really good time last year in its initial incarnation. Pittsburgh was clearly ready for something big, and people responded to many different types of music and visual art combined over the course of the festival. The monthly events the VIA folks have done since then (including Omar-S and many more)…

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Pittsburgh has been off the hook this year! With cats like Omar-S, Ron Trent, Beautiful Swimmers, Protect-U, Donato Dozzy and many more having already played and the largeness of VIA Festival coming up next month, featuring Underground Resistance’s Interstellar Fugitives LIVE, Blondes, Pittsburgh Track Authority, Dam-Funk, East Liberty Quarters, and many many more (more on…

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I’ve long been a fan of the work of Andrés; in fact, he was one of those “holy grail” type producers when I first started buying lots of house and techno a decade ago. His tracks have always been heavily sample based, but originally they were much more tracked out and minimal compared to what…

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In my long summer absence, I never got to talk about DEMF this year. One of the highlights was the Music Institute afterparty, at which I finally was able to meet Red D live in the flesh. We only got a second to chat in a loud room, but it was awesome to make that…

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This is chopped out of a new records post I never finished back in the beginning of summer… Some of my favorite music recently has been coming from people of a distinctly non-dance music background. The two members of Pittsburgh prog band Zombi have both had some nice electronic releases on a bunch of labels,…

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Hey everybody! This is my first time posting in almost three months, and in an effort to get things moving in a more efficient manner for me, I am debuting the new record review posts I will be doing. Really not much is changing, the style will be the same but instead of the round-up…

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We’ve been very busy recently here in Pittsburgh! My PTA partners Adam Ratana, Preslav Lefterov, and I, as well as friend Erin Holland, have joined forces on another project we call In The Machine Age, a business through which we run record labels. We have a Soundcloud page as well as a Twitter page so…

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Nice Rec is a name you should be familiar with by now strictly based on the strength of the first two installments of his Boogieman mix series that have been posted here, each of which contains so many hot joints that it is kind of ridiculous. But now he is now blowing shit up on…

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Photo courtesy of Matt Cohen Photography If you look on the “Categories” sidebar, you’ll see “DEMF 08”, “DEMF 09”, and “DEMF 10”. Before those years when I covered DEMF for this blog, I attended every year from 03 on. Barring a drastic change in how the festival operates, that will be it for me moving…

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So this is part two, just trying to keep the focus on a couple records per post! Here’s some ill Detroit, Chicago, and NYC records I’ve picked up recently…. Any time Reggie Dokes releases a new record, it’s a good thing! When he is starting a new label, you know it means he’s gonna bring…

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So yeah. I’ve been slacking yet again on new record posts, and it has really backed up enough that I’m not even gonna try to do them all in one go. I imagine this will take two or three posts, so bear with me. Pictured above is Chancho Via Circuito at his debut Pittsburgh appearance…

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As promised, our homeboy m50 broke us off with a special mix of all his own tunes and remixes! Producing under the alias Area, he has dropped EPs on Francois K’s Wave Music, Anton Zap’s Ethereal Sound, and more, as well as remixes for Mathematics, Echospace, and Matrix amongst many others. He has also recently…

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This would have come a lot earlier, but an order I made from the UK in late ’10 took until about two weeks ago to get in. Since I already had waited that long, I figured a couple more weeks wouldn’t matter while I waited for more new shit to arrive. Now it’s all here!…

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