Magnetic Man, Heaven

Rave music, in its many ever-mutating forms, is now more than a generation into its existence. Many, possibly most, of the crowd pushing into Heaven, under Charing Cross station, weren't even born when acid house fully hit the UK in 1988, but none of them are here for some retro experience. It's hard, as a superannuated lover of electronic beats, not to feel cultural vertigo at the fact that what once felt like the most impossibly inhuman of sounds has now become so ubiquitous and so established as to be a kind of folk music. But there it is, as established as the blues or punk rock, and as woven into the fabric of our lives, yet still mutating and still throwing up fresh variants such as the dubstep which Magnetic Man play.

Katy B (pictured right) is a performer who has grown up completely within the rave idiom, and has a confidence borne of that. There are hundreds of post-Amy Winehouse soul singers out there, but it's hard to think of any that could stand up in front of as many sweaty youngsters with such natural insouciance, or sing with a voice that is clearly so honed to make its presence felt on a club soundsystem.

Katy's set is full of the Latin-Caribbean rhythms of the currently popular sound of UK funky, but her performance style is that of the classic disco diva – one who enjoys dancing late into the night, and whose performance and pacing come from that fact more than anything else. Her lyrics predominantly spring from a palpable and infectious love of club life, from the self-explanatory "Louder" to "Lights On" which she introduces as being for anyone who doesn't want to stop dancing when the club lights come on at 5am. Her Top 10 single "Katy on a Mission" (see video below), with its refrain of "This right here I swear will end too soon" - which the crowd sing along to in impressive unison - is as perfect an encapsulation of the ephemeral pleasures of the dancefloor as the new millenium has produced yet.

Watch the video of "Katy on a Mission" by Katy B:

But the crowd are here for Magnetic Man, and though Katy B's band of bassist, keyboardist and bongo player have made an excellent heft of replaying the thumping grooves of her songs, that crowd are far more moved by electronic sound. So when the Croydon producers come onstage – even though they are partially hidden behind a cage of LED lights – the reaction is, frankly, mental. They are welcomed as heroes, and when the buzzing funk synthesiser lead line of "Mad" worms its way to the inevitable bass-drop, the crowd leap into the air as if a vast jolt of electricity has passed through the floor and bellow their approval.

It's deserved. The trio of Ollie “Skream” Jones, Beni “Benga” Adejumo (pictured left) and Arthur “Artwork” Smith may be standing behind a bank of technology but they're a world away from the electronic music cliché of nerds checking their email on stage. Even though lights flicker in front of them, the three are clearly engaged in the sound they're making with the passion of any rock band, and when Benga sings into his vocoder or Artwork sends a drum sound echoing across the room, the audience notice and react instinctively.

Watch Magnetic Man & Ms Dynamite perform "Fire" in the BBC's Maida Vale studios:

Concessions are made to old ideas of performance: Ms Dynamite lives up to her stage name with an explosive voicing of “Fire”, and dubstep-scene king Sgt Pokes keeps things moving along with his psychedelic interjections throughout. But it's the electronic beats the crowd are most interested in, and the basslines and snare drums that they applaud the most. The set is endlessly varied - despite only having one album thus far as Magnetic Man, as individual producers the trio have literally hundreds of tracks to their names, and they delve into these to keep things moving.

Any part of the dance-music world is fair game to Magnetic Man. A single track might veer from the commercial sheen of pop-trance riffs into a truly avant-garde digitally-degraded bassline and then into electronic dub reggae - or from a lascivious house-music throb into rippling textures straight out of Steve Reich. But it's done not based on any postmodernist manifesto, but purely because these musicians have been immersed in electronic sound for most of their lives.

And dubstep, as has been documented, has a unique elasticity when it comes to reaching giddy commercial heights while still keeping roots in the underground. Katy B comes on to perform a finale of recent single “Beautiful Stranger” with the band, and the teenagers and twentysomethings go mad once again - but when Magnetic Man return for a dementedly intense electronic jam encore, they go into an entirely different level of appreciation. Raving might be old news, but when the music is done right, it's still culturally vital and as creative as it ever was.

• Find Magnetic Man on Amazon
• Find Katy B on Amazon