“You make me want to cry, thinking about that club,” said May, who was about to DJ at another in Zurich. “I try not to think about the Music Institute. I feel like if I think about it, I can’t play. Because nothing compares to it. Nothing. Nowhere, not even in Japan. Amazing parties, great people, out of control scene, best soundsystem, best clubs, best management, super, super nice business-wise. Everything’s perfect, hotel’s great. But I’ve never played at a place like the Institute. Because it was, like, pure energy; it was young kids that didn’t care. They lined up at night. They were 18, 19 years old. Sweet, young kids. You know what 18, 19 looks like, when you think about it? Just kids, man. And we were just changing the world, and we didn’t know it.”

One of the stranger legacies of the Music Institute was that it made good on its pedagogic promise. The roster of Institute regulars, for one thing, reads like a who’s who of second-wave Detroit techno producers. “The Music Institute was my music education,” Carl Craig told me a few years ago. “It was the closest thing to having a Paradise Garage, or a Music Box, in Detroit.” Richie and Matthew Hawtin began crossing the border from Windsor in 1989 to go. Robert Hood was there. Anthony Shakir used to fall asleep by the speakers. “I miss that club,” said Shakir. “I’m not a club person, but I liked the music. It was about the music, it really was.”

Of the three founders, only Baker stayed in Detroit. “I moved to Toronto,” said Miller. “I was in Toronto by New Year’s Eve [1989] and I ended up being there for a year, year-and-a-half. I remember moving some things into my house from the club and then that was it. I was gone.” Baker drifted to 1515 Broadway, owned by Chris Jaszczak, for a few months. Between the move, he was loosely involved in a members-only loft party, Underground Nation, run by fashion designer Maurice Malone. (There was one more club, the Parabox Cafe, on Michigan Avenue, which he ran with Moore in the mid-’90s.) Eventually, with a young family to support, he left the club scene altogether – he married his wife, Erica, in 1990 – and became a fireman. “I just retired last August,” he said.

In music biographies, artists are routinely described as “uncompromising,” the implication being that those who aren’t are building careers on sand. But the Music Institute, in a lot of ways, was enhanced by compromise. 1315 Broadway was a plan B. Since a top of the range soundsystem was out of the question, the Ashly crossover they made do with was carefully tuned and tested. Neither May’s involvement nor the Friday nights were discussed until a few weeks, perhaps days, before the first party.

The Music Institute was a club that had no intention of running itself like a business. When it tried, the stress of keeping the place solvent corroded the ambition that inspired it: of young black men – “dance party kids,” in Baker’s words, who had undergone an accelerated adolescence – shaping an ideal space from reservoirs of desire and imagination. The Music Institute’s only luxury was the goodwill of its clubbers, who were prepared to forego the “laser light show” for a sensory experience that summoned their subconscious instead. For 18 months, they turned their bodies, and the dreams of three men, inside out.