IN TRUE DANCE music fashion, the couple known as “Mike-and-Laura” wooed each other underneath the strobing lights of the old Sound Factory, a nightclub that was on West 21st Street. The hysteria — albeit an enjoyable sort — was already there when Mr. Bindra, fresh from discovering what was then called house music in Costa Brava, Spain, first showed up in 1990, followed by Ms. de Palma, who says she arrived at the club within a week of relocating from modeling in Paris.

Image The event in 2010. Credit... Willie Davis for The New York Times

“It was an underground place,” she said. “You would get on the dance floor and everybody was celebrating. You kind of just forgot about anything else. It was almost like our religion every Saturday night.”

This was at a time when New York’s nightclubs, especially its after-hours clubs, were filled with every variety of self-expressive freak. “It was just so liberating,” Mr. Bindra said. “You could go there and be free of judgment, of all the stuff you had to deal with in your life. There were Chelsea boys and hip-hop guys and crazy artists. Jean-Paul Gaultier would be there with Madonna, but everyone was really there for the music.”

That music — pulsing and propulsive — had been thrust into the dark of 3 a.m. largely because of its roots in the gay scene of the ’70s. It survived in hiding on the turntables of D.J.s like Frankie Knuckles and Junior Vasquez. Mr. Bindra, then an actor-waiter (“Much more on the waiter side,” he said), was so enamored of the stuff that he arranged a job at the Sound Factory bar, an offshoot of the club, and then another booking acts at Twilo, which took the Sound Factory’s space when it went out of business.

Ms. de Palma, meanwhile, had become a muse and model for the fashion designer Alexander McQueen, and in 1996 she and Mr. Bindra promoted their first show: an after-party for the launch of one of Mr. McQueen’s lines of clothing. They found they liked promoting shows — lining up the talent, finding the proper venue, making easy money. When Twilo closed, after a long campaign against it by the city, and Ms. de Palma quit her modeling career, the couple started Made Event, which began arranging shows at the Roxy, the Roseland Ballroom and at Arc, in TriBeCa, which Mr. Bindra, Ms. de Palma and a partner owned for a couple of years.

Then, in 2003, Made Event organized a show with the German D.J. Paul van Dyk at Rumsey Playfield in Central Park. It drew a crowd of 3,000 and its success led to other outdoor events — at McCarren Pool in Brooklyn, on a Hudson River pier. These were the early avatars of Electric Zoo.