At first I didn’t see it.There was Jonathan Toubin behind the turntables, chest hair sprawling, Dr. Strangelove hair hanging over his right brow, wearing that perpetual smile like, Man you’ve gotta hear this joke. His partner Ian Svenonius, radical rhetorician and former frontman of The Make-Up, who described his first band, Nation of Ulysses, as “a political party,” was off to the side chatting with Jared Leto. How did this fit with his agenda for musical anarchy? What was so radical about being Cake Shop’s guest DJ?

But by the end of the night, I got Toubin’s joke: He and Svenonius know how to make people freak out. I mean really lose it.They can access a primal human circuitry that somehow prefigured the advent of 1960s boogaloo, international freakbeat and garage rock. All that “nntzuh-nntzuh” Euro syncopation, all that New Order, even ol’ Marr and Morrissey, were little queefs of ozone compared to the voltage that these two have amassed over years of rummaging through record bins. They’ve learned how to incite a kind of bond breaking, a freedom claiming, in young psyches.

“There’s a crisis [in dance music],” Toubin says, “and I think we have an alternative.” He and Svenonius weren’t crazy about the Cake Shop gig. Playing under and between live sets, losing a battle for attention. Their next stop was Tip Top Bar in Bed Stuy. I shared a cab with Svenonius, who wore a dapper tan suit and heavy sideburns. He scorned, in his slightly sibilant voice, the repurposing of music in shoppers’ venues. Svenonius, a professor’s son, essayist and sworn enemy of the music industry, is a great pontificator. He can pontificate so far that the ideas turn inside out and he says things like “lighting is more important than music” or “music is overused—you can have silence.”

At Tip Top, the DJs set up in a dance room adjacent to the bar, where some older locals drank peacefully. What followed was two hours of wild amnesia. Svenonius and Toubin would later say it was the best show they’d ever played together. With songs like “Pass the Hatchet” by Roger and the Gypsies and “Out of this World” by Gino Washington, they showed what can be done with clean piercing guitar licks on found 45s. By 3:30 a.m., the room was all wet forelocks, sunken shoulder straps and people shaking uncontrollably.

Then the main event.Toubin and Svenonius took their positions on a balcony overlooking the vast warehouse space of The Shank. Hundreds of people down there, dancing on their hands, kissing each other’s sweat, lingering along the walls and looking out through the haze.When Toubin was warned of police presence, he switched on an old Smokey Robinson record. Nothing weird happening here, no sirs. It worked, for the moment.

At 7 a.m., though, cops cleared the place out. It was the first time this had happened at the makeshift club, and there was word of canceling its weekend parties for good. Over breakfast at Kellogg’s Diner that morning, a concerned friend—the door girl from Cake Shop—asked Toubin how long he thought it would last.

“After hours never lasts,” he said, later adding, “But even if it does shut down, people will still be talking about it for a long time, you know? Like, ‘This thing, it was special.’”