Back in 1960 when he was a strapping egghead of 31, Karlheinz Stockhausen, the father of taped electronic music, had a vision: Every major city in the world would build an auditorium for the appreciation of "space music." Stockhausen's prediction was simply the optimistic ramblings of an intellectual who had everything to gain by the prediction coming true, so I wouldn't blame him for Hawkwind.

Nevertheless, formalist electronic music of the type Stockhausen pioneered in the '50s has, over the past few decades, gradually moved out of the museums and into clubs. Unlike Stockhausen, the artists who make a living performing this kind of music came to it from the technology end. Stockhausen, a student of Messiaen, reportedly took a year to put together "Gesang der Junglinge," a 13-minute, five-channel song "for boy soprano and electronic sound" that was designed to be played as a recording in a church. The composition was condemned by philistines, most of whom couldn't comprehend the idea of paying good money to sit in chairs and listen to a tape. With the help of a desktop computer and the latest version of music-manipulation software such as PowerTools, Stockhausen could have assembled "Gesang" by lunchtime.

One of the most important indie imprints for electronic music is headquartered in the same city that produced Stockhausen: Cologne, Germany. The Sonig label was founded in 1997 by Jan St. Werner and Andi Toma, the two musicians who formed the groundbreaking electronic pop unit Mouse on Mars in 1992. MOM, with its emphasis on distinctly electronic sound and the emptiness (the "space") that surrounds those sounds, can trace its stylistic lineage to krautrock forebears Kraftwerk and Neu!, who, if you'll remember from Roots of Modern Rock 101, had as much to do with the evolution of hip-hop as James Brown did.

The Teutonic rigidness that Kraftwerk characterized is also the main conceptual source of German industrial bands like KMFDM and Atari Teenage Riot. But KMFDM and ATR see themselves as primarily theatrical; MOM, while having fun with the kind of minimalism that Kraftwerk's music embodied, is steeped in theory and, thus, closer in spirit to Stockhausen than even Kraftwerk was.

That said, the youthful audience that showed up to see MOM at Shibuya Club Quattro on May 10 was hardly what you'd call a turtleneck-and-Campari crowd. MOM is still primarily thought of as a dance band, even if Werner, as he once told an interviewer, "can't stand things that are too foreseeable." The difference between German electronic dance music and the British variety is mainly one of form. The Chemical Brothers and Fatboy Slim, to name the two most obvious English examples, come from a hip-hop background, meaning they rely on tape loops and break-beats whose main purpose is to meet listeners' expectations.

MOM means to shatter expectations. Its background is pre-hip-hop, thus freeing it from the concept that once you connect to a good idea, you ride it as long as you can, a concept that Werner says leads to "idea cramps." His aim is to find a good idea, "something beautiful that can make your day," and then move on to the next one. Sound artists Vert and Oval opened the Quattro concert with what could be referred to as displays of theory. Vert, whose real name is Adam Butler, prefers to work from templates. Several years ago he released "The Koln Concert," which re-created in electronic form several of Keith Jarrett's improvised solos from the classic 1975 album of the same name, thus making a deliberate comment on familiar music whose nature was the opposite of deliberate.

Adam Butler (Vert)

Butler's soundscapes seem compositional because they use prerecorded musical elements, though as with much of the Sonig sound, the elements are much more textural than tonal. Butler likes the sound of piano -- not the clear, ringing tones of a grand, but rather the dry, out-of-tune notes produced by an upright that's been collecting dust in the attic for 20 years. Though devoid of harmonies and overt melodies, Butler's overlapping hummings and whirrings are resiliently comforting, never jarring.

Oval, once a three-member sound and performance group, but now reduced to its programming core, Markus Popp, is not technically a Sonig act, but in many ways Popp pioneered the aesthetic with which Sonig is identified: nonmusical elements orchestrated to evoke an emotional response. Composed mainly of various species of white noise and clicks (the result of scarifying, or "preparing," prerecorded CDs), Oval's music can be challenging, especially in a cramped club where if you're not dancing then you're giving your knees an excuse to make you suffer. During Popp's hourlong set, a good part of the audience opted to sit on the floor, and a few in my vicinity seemed to nod off, despite the often gratingly harsh textures he was creating: ambient music for people who live in airplane hangars.

Mark us Popp (Oval/Microstoria)

In contrast, Mouse on Mars seemed almost regressive when it took to the stage with "real" musical instruments: Werner on keyboards, Toma on bass and Dodo Nkishi on drums. The opening number, "Duul," was as far from theory as you could get, hard rock whose main concession to the Sonig idea was wave upon wave of sound effects that rolled over the throbbing bass 'n' drum pattern.

The live version of latest single "Actionist Respoke" was straightforward funk. With Nkishi's vocals receiving less processing than they do on record and Toma's bass carrying the bulk of the melody line, I didn't find much difference between what MOM were doing and what the Chemical Brothers are famous for, except that MOM's jones for liquid textures makes its brand of dance music that much greasier.

And funnier, too. Werner is a big proponent of "absurdity," by which he means not making sense, though in concert it often comes across as silliness. "Introduce" opened with random bleeps, burps and modified bursts of feedback that congealed and then exploded, as if all the pregnant noise had been stuffed into an overloaded Cuisinart, spraying gunk over the laughing, dancing horde.

Jan St. Werner (of Mouse on Mars/Microstoria)

I assumed I'd find more theory the next evening at CAY in Aoyama, which was putting on an event called "Sonig Night." The headliner was Microstoria, a separate project consisting of Popp and Werner. Following a crushingly boring set by a quintet of local musicians schooled in the art of ebb-and-flow minimalism and another beautiful set from Vert, Microstoria took its place onstage, which was furnished with nothing more than a table and two PowerBooks.

What I had hoped would be a struggle of wills between Popp's cold, noisy theory and Werner's quirkier pop sensibility turned out to be a merger of the two that resulted in something that wasn't anything like either. As a team, they were less interested in texture than dynamics, but, in line with Popp's reported dislike of "climaxes," there was nothing cathartic about it. It was interesting, but not enough to prevent my mind from wandering for much of the hourlong set.

I was preoccupied with the position "performance" held in Microstoria's -- and, by extension, German electronica's -- aesthetic universe. Kraftwerk set its keyboards in a line onstage and the members, dressed in identical clothing, played them without moving a muscle. It was a comment on the mechanical nature of contemporary life that automatons onstage could make the flesh-and-blood folks in the audience get down.

Popp and Werner, however, were not being ironic. They were being serious, literally. Popp occasionally swayed to some inner, rhythmic muse, but Werner remained glued to his screen as if he were a NASA operations engineer. Sometimes, he would lean over and discuss strategy with his partner as the noise they were creating roared, crackled or throbbed from the speakers. When the performance finished, the audience waited until the two musicians closed their PowerBooks before applauding. New forms call for new protocols. Stockhausen, I think, would dig it.