The notion of a large group of people congregating under the hot black lights of a dance club, and being pounded into lockstep by an aggressively pulsing rhythm, has always struck me as somewhat ghastly. A recent visit to a local club on a Friday night confirmed my suspicions, as I fought through hordes of purple revelers.

Husband and wife duo Mad Happy seem to reflect this garishness. Theirs is dance music, but it's covered in a certain air of sleaze. They sound like the music that might be booming out of a near-deserted dance floor at four in the morning: shamefully sexy and hazily exhausted upon coming down from the night, the music soldiering on.

Mike iLL and Rivka formed Mad Happy 10 years ago.

"We just decided to put an act together, so we could do our music traveling and still make the relationship work," says Mike iLL. "It developed pretty organically. I've been into electronic music since I was a kid - started messing around with synths and drum machines. Rivka grew up listening to Orthodox Jewish music. That was pretty much the only thing she heard as a kid. And then she started listening to the radio in secret."

The group's sound was shaped on the road. Mike iLL says that, for a while, Mad Happy did about 250 shows a year. What worked on the road, they kept; and what didn't, the band ditched. What Mad Happy was left with is stark, minimal dance music, full of analog sounds and occasional dips into Hasidic folk melodies; the band has an art-punk, almost euro-trash vibe. Currently, Mad Happy are in the process of writing a musical called Joys of Armageddon.

Not surprisingly, the framework of a musical may be the place where Mad Happy's gaudy, dirty music will really flourish - under the hot spotlights on a Friday night stage.

[Le Voyeur, with The Fixt, Z Kamp, Collective Love Unlimited, Saturday, April 24, 9 p.m., no cover, 404 Fourth Ave. E., Olympia, 360.943.5710]