Though many of the artists that took part in the event were truly legendary, with several of them making their New York debut, there was one performer that, for me, stood head and shoulders above the rest. Alan Howarth, the synthesizer mastermind who became John Carpenter’s frequent collaborator during the ’80s and ’90s, was booked at Le Poisson Rouge to perform excerpts of some of his most classic movie scores, including Halloween and Escape from New York and Big Trouble in Little China.

Watching Alan play this jangly riff in a darkened room with about 250 other people gave me a seriously nerdy thrill. As he ran through other films (Christine, The Thing) I hoped against hope that he’d also play the soundtrack from Prince of Darkness, a personal favorite of mine that involves an evil green liquid and Alice Cooper looking creepy in a trench coat. He didn’t (maybe next time) but he did play the amazing nuevo-cowboy jam of a theme to They Live.

After an extended take on the Halloween theme, which was genuinely spooky, Alan’s all-too-short set was up. Thankfully, he came back at the end of the night to collaborate with Emeralds, who have taken up the banner of atmospheric, synth-heavy sounds and infused them with a simmering menace that’s both melodic and haunting. Before they began their set Alan spoke briefly about a new project he was working on with them, which involved measuring and exploiting the natural resonant frequencies of the Egyptian pyramids. Consider me intrigued.

Confession. I stumbled upon these insanely amazing Surface to Air boots last week and have been unable to stop thinking about them. Yes, they are $425 (not including the shipping from who knows where!) but never before have I felt such intense longing for a pair of shoes. They perfectly capture a mix of tough girlyness and street chic style, plus they have this ’90s Na Na/pretty grunge vibe that I am really loving right now. I would pair them with everything from  a tshirt and skinny gray jeans to poufy skirts and cardigans.  Forever 21 has a  similar style I’m still dreaming of those buckle platform babies.

So when I saw that MoMA was set to open a career retrospective of Burton’s work I got as excited as PeeWee reuniting with his beloved bike. Opening on November 22 and running through April 2010, there’ll be previously hidden away artwork and films from his days as a student at Cal Arts and copious amounts of drawings, puppets, costumes and sketches from throughout his career.

Tim Burton MoMA retrospective

There’s really nothing new or shocking about what Gaga does–she owes as much to 90′s  performance artist Leigh Bowery and clubkid demi-god Michael Alig as she does to glam  rockers David Bowie and Freddie Mercury. Every generation needs a performer that’s  outrageous, creative, and bold and Gaga has stepped into that role with panache. While I find  her musical offerings to be generic club fodder that reminds me of the pounding eurotechno I  grew up listening to on Long Island, I admire and appreciate the contrast between her bland  beats and her aggressively adventurous style. Part of me wonders if that is not also part of her  appeal and a secret to her success. Musicians who pursue sonic adventures are generally met  with resistance and derision (see: Bob Dylan’s plugged in performance at the Newport Folk  Festival; Stravinsky’s riot-inducing performance of the ‘Rites of Spring’) while Cher can wear  a gothic, midriff-bearing spiked dress to the Oscars and be lauded for her idiosyncratic style.  Maybe innovative style is simply easier for us to process and understand.

Still, after watching the video for ‘Bad Romance’ I can no longer deny the creative force that drives Gaga to ever higher and stranger heights. When I turn the sound down I’m completely engrossed in the sheer spectacle of it all: the eyeless latex crowned bodysuits; the gleaming metal body sphere harness; the bejeweled Alexander McQueen spacesuit (replete with hoof shoes!). Once I set aside my jealousy over her access to some of the most forward-thinking fashion designers around I can’t help but smile. She wears the unwearable effortlessly and gracefully and asks us to admire the beauty in the strange and unusual.

A few years ago, a dear friend made me watch Shaye St. John’s ‘Broken Neck Doll’ video on Youtube. I was horrified. After I recovered from the sight of Shaye, bandaged and disheveled and announcing her medication requirements in a sped-up, helium inflected voice, I demanded to see it again. And again. Since that fateful night I’ve spent countless hours watching Shaye’s grainy, low budget videos, or ‘triggers,’ laughing, screaming, and wondering who unleashed this prescription powered psychopath on us.

While the origins of Shaye may be as murky as the details of Daft Punk’s true identities, there’s no denying the terrible beauty of Shaye herself. Her Old Hollywood glamour ruined by a tragic car accident (or so the myth goes), her arms and legs have been replaced by puppet marionette limbs that mysteriously function without any strings. Sometimes she wheels herself around in a wheelchair, other times she walks around in a caftan and matching headscarf, dramatically waving her doll hands and tossing her curly brown hair. I always found her face to be the most disturbing sight of all, sometimes bandaged, sometimes covered in a generic facemask cut apart at the jaw for easier movement. There’s something about the sight of a real mouth topped with dead plastic eyes that really spooked me.

Shaye plays with burnt baby-dolls, rummages in garbage heaps , goes on the Internet 24/7 and indulges in wire therapy because, well, that’s what Shaye does. Some of the videos have a narrative arc but mostly they’re vignettes of a deranged nature, full of dated, repetitive visual graphics and Shaye’s high pitched ramblings. In terms of it’s absurdity and total illogical point of view, the only thing that even comes close are some of the more random hypercolored cutscenes in the free-associative cult Adult Swim show, ‘Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!’

Shaye’s website, is not for the faint of heart but worth exploring. If you’re really daring, get his Triggers DVD . It’a funhouse mirror of a compilation that’s almost impossible to navigate, so just close your eyes, pick a trigger and let Shaye tell you all about her friends.

It’s hard not to love a style that sounds like the 8-bit lovechild of Kraftwerk and Solvent topped with the occasional high-pitched disco diva sample. Sure, it’s bordering on the ridiculous but in a musicscape littered with superserious artistes it’s refreshing to smile while dancing to a track like Barracuda’s ‘Skweee Like a Pig’ or recent Planet Mu inductee Eero Johannes’ ‘Leisi Elli’. Whatever skweee lacks in in the pokerface department it more than makes up for in playful commitment and sheer dancebaility. Forward thinking artists like Roska and Ikonika have already picked up on skweee’s influence and with a forthcoming documentary it’s only a matter of time before the rest of the world does too.

We call it Skweee -mini preview from David Giese on Vimeo.

Nightslugs are a different story. Comprised of dubbel step originator L-Vis 1990 and Dj/producer/graphic designer Bok Bok, Nightslugs is a musical collaboration and catch-all term for their warped voyages into global gutter house and heavy bass. Driven by their love of subterranean techno, jacking electro, dirty bmore and filthy grime tinged with sunny soca beats and old school r’n’b rhythms, they pack their eponymous no holds barred monthly party with the next-level likes of Jackmaster (.5 of the cheerfully rabid duo Acid Jacks and ringleader of Idiot House), Untold (a former web designer who’s been producing mindwarping dubstep for all of 18 months) and Joy Orbison (I’ve had the gravity challenged horn loop of ‘Hyph Mngo’ bouncing around my skull for weeks.)

Proud to be the British kindred spirit of NYC’s Trouble & Bass, these Brighton boys had the honor of dropping their first EP as the last release on Dress 2 Sweat, which in an unholy merger with Stuff Records and Wireblock, is ready to drown the world in spinal cord injury inducing soundwaves. You’d be remiss not to RSS the excellent Lower End Spasm, which is regularly updated by Bok Bok and others with fresh mixes and podcasts. And if that’s not enough, check out Bok Bok’s every other Saturday radio show on sub.fm to start your night off right good.

Of course, that’s not to say I’m glad he didn’t. Power is a journey through stripped down electro beats and high frequency sonic bursts that collide with hazy soundwaves and unexpectedly soft melodies. Whereas some of the tracks on Oi Oi Oi seemed buried under layers of jagged industrial influence, Power has a spare, militaristic feel echoed in the simple but harsh Soviet stye red and black cover design and song titles like ‘Trooper’ and ‘Transmission.’

‘Gax’ sets the tone with a softly shimmering Boards of Canada melody punctuated by twitchy hi-hats and mournful sirens, all memories of which are quickly erased by the fluid riffs and otherwordly vocoder swagger of ‘Kontakt Me.’ ‘Starter’ and ‘Jeffer’,’ released earlier on a separate EP, keep up the relentless pace with thunderous beats and ray-gun duels between The most surprising track is ‘Sweet Light,’ a playful acid techno romp of a bouncing bassline and two-step snare drums that wouldn’t sound out of place on a Claude von Stroke b-side, while ‘Rozzbox ‘ and ‘Nott’ bring thick and distorted powertool buzz atop layers of wiry Detroit techno.

Ridha’s schedule as of late has seen him spin a guest mix of Power on Jaymo and Andy George’s BBC Radio 1 show, release an August mixtape stuffed with tunes by DJ Hell, Modeselektor and labelmate D.I.M, and book a North American tour that will stop at FIXED’s sure to sell out Halloween night party at Santos Party House in NYC. Power is out now on iTunes and Boys Noize Records.

It’s an astoundingly simple idea that speaks volumes about the technological advances we’ve quickly absorbed into our society. A band releases digital files of the individual instrumental tracks and lets users download them to reconceptualize the original work. Many groups still commission high-profle artists and producers for bonus tracks and B-sides, but Radiohead was one of the first artists to turn songs over to their audience with separate contests for ‘Nude’ and ‘Reckoner,’ the first two singles off In Rainbows. Working with Apple to make the tracks, or stems, available through iTunes and Garageband, users paid a small fee for each stem and uploaded the completed work to the Radiohead website. Being above such trivial matters as prizes and winners, Radiohead announced the only reward would be that they would listen to the best remixes.

Following the enormous response and success of Radiohead’s project, artists like Passion Pit, Depeche Mode and even the Black Eyed Peas turned to their fans for a unique take on their material. Indie darlings Passion Pit made the stems for ‘Little Secret’ available for the price of an email address a month before the May release of their debut album Manners, and let fans trade back and forth to collect all the snippets. They then had fans vote on the best ten submissions, and chose five of those for inclusion on a limited edition vinyl-only single. Depeche Mode teamed up in April with electronic music website Beatport to announce the remix competition for ‘Peace,’ the first single from their twelfth studio album Sounds of the Universe. In addition to releasing the winning entry through Mute Records, their longtime label home, Depeche Mode also gifted the lucky producer with thousands of dollars worth of studio equipment. And if you aren’t already sick of hearing their ubiqiuitous single (and current Target jingle) ‘I’ve Gotta Feeling,’ this month the Black Eyed Peas will feature the ten best remixes on Dipdive.com, the online home for all things BEP, and shower the winner with Korg syntheizers, Moog effects pedals and a $500 Beatport giftcard.