Halloween takes a spin around the world and around the Ashkenaz dance floor with three border-breaking Bay Area ensembles: Gamelan X, El Radio Fantastique, and Shovelman. Perfect music for any costume you wear… and yes, there is a costume contest!

The 2011 winner of the Burning Man Marching Band contest, at the festival where they always stand out, the 12-person ensemble Gamelan X has been labeled “The Bay Area’s own Funkadelic of ethnomusicology” (San Francisco Bay Guardian), as it draws inspiration from Indonesian, Balkan, African, Indian, and American traditions. The dynamic, original music is a hybrid of interlocking Balinese rhythms and sinewy melodies that pulls the audience into a vast, exotic soundscape. The musicians perform on a customized set of bronze gongs that expands the traditional harmonic palette of Balinese music. Add synth bass, live drum kit, brass, strings, African percussion, engaging group choreography, and crowd interaction, and the result is a visceral groove experience that excites and entrances listeners. “Gamelan X is a precision-guided tour de force of rhythm, sounds, theater and performance art. Think Cirque du Soleil meets Sun Ra and you won’t want to miss them,” says Evan Levy, director of Georgia’s Art in Freedom Park.

San Francisco’s theatrical El Radio Fantastique is an eight-member band that views itself as “a stitched together B-movie creature – part  rumba band in purgatory, part cinematic chamber group, part shipwrecked serenade.” Haunting, melancholic melodies are performed with an exhilarating instrumental mix, with plenty of tympani (kettle drums) to provide a deep anchor. The group is headed by the charismatic former New Orleans mime and singer/songwriter/multi-instrumentalist Giovanni DiMorente, who relocated here in the wake of Hurricane Katrina and quickly assembled his dream band in 2005. “My vision, and my mission, is to take the haunting excitement of many old forms of music, including classical, and making them modern while giving respect to their place in history,” DiMorente says, “hopefully conjuring something new.” Along with DiMorente, El Radio Fantastique is guitarist-bassist-singer Colin Schlitt, organist-singer Robin Livingston, drummer Gene Fisher, violinist-singer Sharron Drake, clarinetist-percussionist Loyal Tarbet, baritone saxophonist Patrick Byers, and trombonist Jade Ismael. The on-stage mashup of global forms borrows tunes from the band’s latest CD, the holiday-appropriate “Waking the Dead.”

A wizard of electronica, experimental, and folk music, Shovelman (offstage known as Isaac Frankle) brings an earthy presence to tonight’s proceedings. Armed with a collection of pawnshop effects pedals and an old barn shovel he has turned into a slide guitar, Shovelman plays folktronica-grooves looped straight out of the ground. Before one’s very eyes (and ears) he goes from soloist to full band without adding anyone else! And he sings, too, at no extra charge. His Mississippi Delta blues mashup with electro-psychedelic future can be found on the Junk Wreckords label.