Florida's Rabbit in the Moon are an anomaly in the underground electronic music world. In a culture that thrives making faceless, independent dance music tracks for an equally faceless and independent scene, Rabbit in the Moon instead stick to doing remixes for high-visibility acts like Sarah McLachlan and Tori Amos, while maintaining their own high-visibility with extravagant live shows. But it is precisely because they offer such a dose of hi-tech spectacle in the image-starved rave scene that the Florida duo (David Christophere and performance artist Steve "Bunny" McClure) could do no wrong headlining the twelve-hour "Freaks Believe in Beats" rave party.

Thrown by local underground promoters Analogue Systems at a riverfront industrial trucking terminal underneath Detroit's Amabassador Bridge to Canada, "Freaks" was indeed a rave, with two of its three areas (the actual terminal building and an ad hoc, Mad Max-ish outdoor compound walled by semi-trucks) devoted to deejay sets of jungle and hard techno. But while Chicago junglist Danny the Wildchild invigorated his mixing with aggressive record scratching, it was the outdoor main stage, framed by projection screens and laser lights, that made "Freaks" more a rock festival than a rave. With live sets by acts like Los Angeles breakbeat artist Uberzone and Ann Arbor electro band Ectomorph, there was as much to look at as dance to, even if that was, as in Uberzone's case, a guy tweaking knobs and occasionally adding electronic percussion to sequenced beats.

Which goes far to explain why at 4:30 a.m., as warm-up deejay Munk completed his intro-set of house and bass tracks, the mixed 2,000-plus crowd of ravers and alt-rockers were so enrapt as RITM's synchronized films filled the side-stage and backdrop screens. Surrounded by keyboards and triggering live drum accents, Chistophere began Rabbit's set of ambient techno, but it wasn't until a roadie emerged wearing a huge, sinister Rabbit suit -- with a pierced ear, no less -- that the crowd really responded. Bunny then came out in a bat-like cloak, which, after standing ominously center stage sizing up the crowd, he threw off, revealing a thousand glow-stick strands bound to his body like luminous straw on a great psychedelic scarecrow. Hurling himself across the stage, he threw the sticks off, finally stage-diving. By the end of the song, the crowd was furiously swinging glow-sticks with Bunny as conductor.

As Christophere drifted through their next seven songs, most undefinable except for the snatches of vocals from the remixed originals (Goldie's "Inner City Life," etc.), Bunny proceeded with as many costume changes, from a mirror-suit, to a black-lit Beetle-juice striped suit with a dozen pointy appendages, to samurai garb, which he wore to do battle with an Oriental puppet-dragon during the drum 'n bass-y third song. As much a mascot as a frontman for the music, Bunny emerged at one point in a suit of white Christmas lights for the ravers -- who was wearing prismatic cardboard glasses thrown to them by Christophere -- to ooh and ahh at.

While the music's beat remained an uptempo 120 beats per minute or so of twinkling keyboards and shuffling techno-disco beats -- save for Christophere's outta-nowhere mid-set theremin solo -- it was Bunny's performance-art interpolations that pushed RITM's set beyond the usual rave vernacular of "dope" and "phat" and into the realm of Artaud's Theater of Cruelty. For the finale, he proceeded to cover his face with an iron mask, which he then took a rotary saw to, showering the front of the stage with sparks, which he then repeated on a teddy-bear carrying raver to close the show.

By galvanizing their otherwise opaque music with performance art, Rabbit in the Moon combined the little fluffy beat psychedelia of the Orb with the brute-force theatrics of German glam-metallists Rammstein. While rave-purists may bristle at the reliance on spectacle borrowing liberally, once could argue, from the broad theatrics of Peter Gabriel and the goth camp of fellow Floridians Marilyn Manson, it was clear at this Detroit rave that a Rabbit in the Moon performance is as effective as it is affected.

HOBEY ECHLIN