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I’m onstage fellating the giant red nose of a woman in a six-foot tall hot dog suit. At most shows, this would seem pretty bizarre, but tonight at First Avenue it feels like a natural progression of events. Philadelphia Dj-ing phenom Diplo is well worn into his post behind his turntables. The throng of dancers in the audience have long since checked their coats and wiped the first layers of sweat from their foreheads. With Diplo and his frenetic light show of a Dj booth thrust into the crowd in front of the main stage, the most star struck techno fans are carnivorously clawing their way to the edge of his oasis, screaming like they need lung surgery and dripping beats from their fangs.

The night evenly mixed traditional club music with forays into experimentalism. The Brooklyn duo Telepathe heated up this explosion. If this is dance music they play, it’s club bangers for the weirdos, those serious audiophiles who own every Brian Eno album and whose favorite Gary Numan song is definitely not “Cars.” And, if anything, Telepathe are serious audiophiles.

Melissa Livaudais needs no encouragement to launch into in-depth conversations about her craft. She talks with relentless passion about her music: how she and partner Busy Ganges sometimes layer 100 tracks into a single song, the evolution of their atmospherics, and the hours spent every day noodling on their laptop until they create such thickly blossoming compositions that the resulting sound is as expansive as it is explosive. Think Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound updated for the technological age. But, instead of saccharine-sweet Motown harmonies, Telepathe’s songs are capped off with Livaudais’ ethereal howls. These are elegant tinkerers. These are pop-hound masterminds who play music not for the lights, not for the glossy headlines, but because they simply cannot fathom doing anything else.

“Busy and I, we’re the biggest music nerds,” Livaudais says. “And we have gotten fired from every kind of service industry job in New York. There were just no more jobs for us. We can’t even go eat in places.”

Perhaps it’s fate they find themselves lumbering coast to coast this fall, working up their chops in time for their full-length debut in February. One thing is certain, they will be a different band the next trip around. The duo is constantly progressing and changing, due in part to the challenges with translating their heavily orchestrated music into a stage performance.

“It used to have a really organic live feel because we played all the songs in real time,” Livaudais says. “We worked out the songs in a rehearsal space and recorded them after they were worked out. Now our process has completely flip-flopped. We spend hours and hours sitting in front of the computer, layering and arranging and composing the song without having an idea of how to play it live. It’s been trial and error. We’re this close now to having it actually make people’s heads explode.”

Where Telepathe is tightly choreographed, Abe Vigoda puts on airs of fly-by-the-cuff insanity. Merging two guitarists, a bassist and drummer with math rock and noise, the band creates an atonal soup built upon some hidden logic only music majors understand. The result is a mythic beast that must suck its nutrients from the basement clubs of their Los Angeles home. Tonight, Minneapolis is clamoring for infection.

Abe Vigoda hash out trance-inducing psychedelic sludge. But for these art-rockers, pop chords simply don’t exist. Those frets have been lost in the black hole of Top 40 radio. Instead, the band spends their time day dreaming around the lower frets, throwing their heads back and shaking so violently it seems as if electricity is running straight from their strings through their veins.

This isn’t music you dance to. You just awkwardly flail. But the art of the flail is a wonder in its own right. The 4/4 stomping and the manic hip gyrations, you can do that any day.