In case you hadn't noticed, electronic music is changing. The credo of faceless techno is on its last legs. DJ music that only really makes sense in a club just won't cut it any more. It's been done to death, a million times over. Instead of making endless tiny components for an ever-expanding machine, the challenge now is to stand apart from the crowd, with your own sound and your own vision. The music that really matters now has something else to offer, something to engage the mind as well as the feet. The music that matters now goes beyond the dance.

Some are pushing resolutely forwards, trying to define what it means to be an electronic artist – look at Jeff Mills, with his soundtracks and concept albums, for example. But still others are looking backwards, rediscovering the past to create a new future, remembering what it was that made them fall in love with music in the first place. Where once pop and performance were dirty words, pricks for techno to kick against, now bands like Miss Kittin & The Hacker, Chicks On Speed and Fischerspooner, and producers like Gerhard Potuznik, Terrence Fixmer and Ed DMX – to name but a few – are reclaiming them for the future.

But if one band are leading the charge, it's Adult., the Detroit husband and wife team of Adam Lee Miller and Nicola Kuperus. Earlier this year, they released Resuscitation, a CD compiling mostly new mixes of tracks from all four of the Adult. EPs to date. The result is the most exciting album in ages. Resuscitation is electronic, but it's as much about pop music as it as about techno and electro. Its tracks have pop structures: intros, melodies, lyrics and hooks. Its frequent abrasiveness and dislocated, haughty, half-spoken vocals hark back to punk, while its deceptively simplistic, stiff electro music speaks of '80s new wave and Kraftwerk. Its songs deal with the contemporary realities of life: technology, consumerism, communication, entertainment, environment. In short, it's retro – there, I said it – but thoroughly modern too. And it rocks.

That Adult. are not Afraid To Rock is something Adam and Nicola are particularly proud of. For example, the fact that some of the crowd at their recent New York gig were slamdancing is a source of great pleasure to them both. "Nicola actually had to tell the crowd to calm down, and that's great!" enthuses Adam. "That's just the point we're trying to get at. You know, Nicola had a lesbian flash her tits at her [Nicola collapses in laughter] – it's exciting that people are getting excited. We've played a ton of shows and we know what songs work now. We always play really adrenaline-laced songs, we spend a lot of time practising, getting the songs to blend together in a real exciting way. It still has elements of improv – we can make things shorter, faster, speed 'em up, slow 'em down." "It's like going to see a band play," Nicola interjects, her cracked voice testifying to a sore throat. "Yeah," continues Adam, "I mean, we've tried this thing in the past where we play a couple of slow songs and it just doesn't work – you know, if you're out late you need a lot of uptempo stuff to keep you awake! [laughs] And with us both being majorly into a lot of punk rock in our teen years, there' s a lot of that energy in it, which is obviously coming across if people are slamdancing!"

Both of them are painfully aware of the live shortcomings of so much electronic music. "I think people like shows," says Nicola. "I get really excited when a good live band comes to Detroit because they're so few and far between. There's been a lot of laptop bands that have come through and it's OK, but." "It's not OK!" splutters Adam, laughing. "It sucks! It's like, two guys sitting – sitting! – behind a computer. Like, what have we come to? It's kind of the next stage after the noise bands, but at least there you got to watch people hit stuff! It reminds me of what Gene Simmonds said about why they started Kiss: all four of those guys were friends and they kept wanting to go see bands – like a band would come through and they'd be so excited beforehand, then they'd go and they'd be disappointed, so they said 'Let's start a band that'll be exciting'. We've approached our live shows like that since day one, and we keep getting closer and closer to our goal. It would be great in the future if we could get some kind of production budget and put on the show we've always envisioned."

Adam and Nicola met in an art gallery. He paints, she's a photographer (although interestingly they've never worked together on anything other than music). But their work doesn't exist seperately from their music; instead, it courses through every beat of every track. On an immediate level, for example, their work forms the basis of the band's visual identity: Nicola's photographs adorn the record sleeves whilst Adam is responsible for clean, sharp typefaces used on all the Ersatz Audio releases. Not forgetting their smart, minimalist and ever-so-slightly retro dress sense.

Yet it goes deeper than that. Nicola: "His paintings are very clean and minimal, with a lot of ideas involved in them and there's always a concept that is very minimal. My photography, I think, always has an awkward, uncomfortable feeling behind it, and I think that also applies with the music – it's not like, loose and bubbly." Adam: "She usually has her photographs sketched out before the make up artist gets set. My painting are hard edge, so everything has to be planned and taped off, it's not like just pushing paint around – everything is very planned and structured."

As a result, Adult. records are frequently conceived before a note is played and audibly betray the detached, observational nature of the artist. Minors At Nite, for example, taken from the Nausea EP, directly resulted from one of Adam's paintings of the same name. "I had done a series of paintings about what juveniles do for entertainment," he explains, or at least, attempts to. "It's hard to explain, but it had all these references like playing records and video games. There was another called Teenage Freedom, which had a bicycle and a logo from a popular movie house in America, and the background was a pattern of cigarette butts. It wasn't nostalgia, it was sympathetic to being young in America. You know, you get on your bike and you go to the movies and you smoke cigarettes with your friends."

In the same way, the track Nausea itself arose from the idea of a series of photographs about human phobias. "We wrote down tons of ideas based around touching things with latex gloves," recalls Nicola, "Like when you pump that gas you think of how many people have touched that gas pump before you and all that. So that's where the concept came from." "That we're both crazy!" Adam interrupts, laughing. "We both don't like to touch things in public," Nicola continues. "The concept definitely came before the music on that one, we kinda created the songs around that concept." "Electronic music is often catergorised as sterile and not human, too," adds Adam, "so I think it's an abstract reference to that whole anti-electronic crowd."

Adult. began two or three years ago, while Adam was one half of Le Car with Ian Cinch-Jones. On the side, he recorded solo as Artificial Material, but as Nicola began to become more and more involved and the music began to change as a result, a new name seemed to be in order. After a brief excursion as Plasma Co. for Cologne's Electrecord label, the first . release was 1988's Dispassionate Furniture EP – a track "dedicated to the estranged relationships that develop between furniture and their masters". Adam describes the band's formation as "a natural evolution" and claims that there was never any real plan. "One thing I have always tried to do with the label, from the very beginning is, I'm always trying to watch for the trends and I'm trying to avoid them. In '95 when the label [Ersatz Audio] started, it kind of had an idea [the dictionary defines Ersatz as 'serving as a substitute; synthetic; artificial'] and then when that blew up with Autechre and all that, that's when I started moving into more of an electro sound in '96, which wasn't popular then. Then the electro sound blew up and that's when Le Car started doing synth-pop references, and then that kinda blew up. So that's when Nicola and I started working together. If we had any concept for Adult. it was just what's not being done and we started to use more industrial references and doing vocals and whatnot. That seems to be getting more popular now, but I don't think we will stop that. [laughs]"

Yet the name also gives away another aspect of the music. Ostensibly inspired by the cover of Soft Cell's Non Stop Erotic Cabaret LP, which pictures Marc Almond and Dave Ball in front of an adult bookshop, Adam admits that calling the band Adult. was a reflection of their ages, too: "We knew that the music would be more serious. When you've played a handful of seventeen-year-old candy raves, you start to want to distinguish yourself apart from that audience."

Resuscitation has already been out for a couple of months, so for once I find myself in the rare position of interviewing a band after a release instead of beforehand. The album received, it is fair to say, mixed reviews. So what did they think of the critical reaction? Adam: "It seems like the main thing the magazines are saying is, well, they always do this string of adjectives, like." Nicola butts in, laughing: "Hot new robot music!"

"Exactly," Adam continues. "Robo-pop-electro-funk-sexy-machine music. Which is fine – I'm glad that it takes a lot of adjectives to describe our music. But we're a little bored with the whole 'robo' thing. One thing we love about releasing records is getting feedback and seeing what the general consensus is, and that's what keeps us going, the reactionary qualities. So now we're really ready – of course it's going to be a long time before we get in the studio again – but when we start writing our next album, it's going to be a lot dirtier and. a lot less 'robo'! [laughs]"

But whilst no new Adult. recordings may be planned for the time being, the last year or so has seen a veritable flood of Adult. remixes. K-Rock, Fischerspooner and Tuxedomoon are just three of the artists to receive the Adult. treatment recently, while mixes for GD Luxxe (aka Gerhard Potuznik), Phoenicia and Jackass & Mule are all due for release in the coming months. In addition, the pair are currently working on a remix of Detroit proto-techno classic Sharevari by A Number Of Names. "They're fun," says Nicola, "but shit, they take a lot of time, you know? You spend all this time reworking somebody else's songs and it takes away your time to make your own. But you learn a lot of things doing it."

Adam picks up the thread: "You get to use elements you've never used. Like, 'I would never write a keyboard line like that, but it works'. I think it helps to expand your abilities, because you have to deal with a lot of elements you never normally have to deal with. We're definitely slowing down now, though – we've done sixteen remixes now, I think, which is quite funny when you think that Adult. has written a total of like, twenty songs."

And what about this new movement in electronic music? How do Adult. feel about being categorised as part of a new resurgence in electronic pop music? Adam adopts a realistic approach to it all. "I think nowadays that there's so much music out there that you have to have your bigger categories. Yeah, it sucks, but I think it's just a fact of life, like death and bills – it just has to happen. Or rather, it just will happen, no matter what you do. In some ways, it might help: I mean, if you look at techno, techno got started because of Virgin putting out the Techno! compilation. Once you have a movement, then all the people are like 'Look, we've got something'. It's funny, I think about that and then I think about new wave. I bet there were so many bands that hated being called new wave and being lumped into that. Every artist always says 'Oh, I'm not that genre'."

So the most exciting band around right now are a married couple who don't like to touch things in public and who have just twenty songs of art-inspired-robo-electro-punk-new wave-retro-pop to their name. You couldn't make it up.