by RAF KATIGBAK

Finding the right costume is always tricky. The first thing to remember is comfort over cost. There's no sense in dropping mad cash on an elaborate cyber-octopus Matrix outfit if it takes you half an hour to get to the bar because you keep poking people in the eye with your goddamn $300 latex cyber-tentacles. The only other thing to consider (besides the fact that Afro pimp wigs on white college guys are pretty much the new blackface) is: When in doubt, incorporate real food into your outfit. Last year, my friend Tim stapled two slabs of raw pork to his tighty-whiteys and went as Steve-o from Jackass: The Movie. "It was worth the rotten-meat-soaked-in-beer stench just to see the look on my vegetarian friends' faces," he would later confide. It may not be politically correct, given the current food shortages all over the world, but hey, it's Halloween! Evil is in the air. Okay, maybe not.

Whether you wanna go all the way by going as Ashlee Simpson and lip-synching to pre-recorded party banter, or if you just want to go with the classic "I'm a ghost with hemorrhoids" routine, you still need to know where to head. Consider this Disko a quick Halloween walk through the good side of town - you know, the one with those big, expensive-looking houses that you just know are giving full-size chocolate bars.

Tonight, DJ Mini will be welcoming none other then Munich electro act Zombie Nation to her Overdose weekly at Parking. For those not familiar, ZN has been responsible for some of the hottest electro-punk bombs of the last five years. How many DJ producers can claim such success on a strict diet of human flesh, I ask you? Besides Paul Oakenfold, that is.

Friday night is just crazy. First it's Soirée Risquée at Café Studio Délima (6409 St-Hubert) where Stephen Beaupré (live) and DJs Deadbeat, Vincent Lemieux and Akufen promise to drop more wax on your ass than the Marquis de Sade. Over at Salon Daomé, house mogul Angel Moraes plays a very special and intimate Paradise Garage-inspired soul, funk and disco set. And over at Stereo, Vancouver breaks figure DJ Czech takes control of the decks. Up in the Mile-End area, Black Market, Ensemble Camp, Argon Floozy and DJ Khanfucius bring the leftfield noise to your sure-to-be-blown minds at la Salle d'Attente (5490 St-Laurent) for another installment of the Phoniq series of concerts.

This Saturday, PVC Productions are switching gears from their regular Razzmatazz gigs to concentrate on high-quality, ultra-mega-powerful one-off shows of the socks-blowing-off variety. DJs Amyl Nitrate and Radiowhore go out with a bang as Memphis performs a 10 p.m. live set at Missy Bar, with lots of costume prizes, CD giveaways and other fun stuff. Three dollars before 11:30 p.m., free after.

Finally, just to let all you Disko-philes know, this column will be on hiatus for the next six weeks as I will be 13,173 kilometres away from Montreal on a discount Asian sex tour I won as a prize in a hot dog eating contest last April. Watch out early December for the return of Disko and tales of ladyboy chicanery… in the meantime, tune in next week for a new rock column.

Braaaaaiiiiiinnnnsss! Diskoakimbo@sympatico.ca

>> Music Listings