On the same night Underworld played the second of two shows at the Usher Hall, next door at the Traverse Theatre, This is Memorial Device was midway through a short run. Seeing both within a matter of hours, I felt an exchange of currents, a renewed awareness of the short distance we travel between euphoria and sorrow when we start mixing music and memory.

The short play, adapted and directed by Graham Eatough from the novel by David Keenan, concerns the brief, wayward life of a (fictional) 1980s cult band from Airdrie. We see how the group’s complicated yet charismatic personal dynamic, intense improvised music and quasi-occult power was once revered by a handful of diehards. And how, 40 years later, its legacy has been memorialised and mythologised on stage by the band’s ‘archivist’, played by Paul Higgins with a perfect mix of a true believer’s undying enthusiasm, distanced self-awareness and little-boy-lost poignancy.

He was plonked behind a stack of tech so vast it could have sent something into space

Next door, the crowd at Underworld was also memorialising something: the glory days of their rave years. Rather than presented as abstract scraps of memory, as in the play, here the past was recreated in real time as a neatly repackaged, glossily tamed version of the 1990s rave scene. Underworld did a pretty good job of turning an ornate concert hall into a sweaty, smoke-drenched warehouse, especially for those of us standing on the venue floor, but it remained an ornate concert hall, nonetheless. Proceedings concluded sensibly by 11 p.m., a time when most clubbers are just starting to think about going out for the night.

Underworld are a pair. Singer Karl Hyde, who has the look these days of Julius Caesar in a BBC4 historical reconstruction, provided the physical connection between humans and machines. Microphone in hand, he sang with gusto, pulled from a full repertoire of ropey dad-raver dance moves, and generally worked tirelessly to keep a boisterous crowd engaged for almost three hours with very little else to look at.

His partner Rick Smith was plonked on a podium behind a stack of technology so vast it could probably have sent something into space. From it, he conjured all the music: big bass beats, hard electro edges, melodic top lines, thrilling drops and pounding climaxes. For all the sense that at times we were attending a particularly febrile school reunion disco, there were moments of real attack. Hyde’s vocals on ‘Pearl’s Girl’ were pitched down and distorted to the point where it felt rather transgressive. ‘Tin There’ ended the first set with an uncompromising barrage of noise and strobe lighting which sent many of us scurrying outside to reset our coordinates. I was still blinking away the after-effects by the time the intermission ended.

The second set veered towards the hits. ‘Rez/Cowgirl’ and ‘King of Snake’ felt as era-evocative as any late 1990s rock anthems. ‘Dark & Long (Dark Train)’ was as dramatic and propulsive as its title promised. Of the more recent material, ‘Denver Luna’ stood out as ghostly electro-rockabilly, a distorted second cousin of early rock and roll.

The final song, ‘Born Slippy .NUXX’, made a special kind of sense in Edinburgh. It has been a hometown anthem of sorts since 1996, when it was included on the Trainspotting soundtrack, a film to which it is umbilically linked. It is the ne plus ultra of the Underworld sound – maximalist techno overlaid with Hyde’s fractured, not-quite-nonsense poetry, the torrent of words stirring up a mosaic of blurred recognitions.

These lyrical fragments give Underworld’s music heart amid the hedonistic bang and clatter. They offer a glimpse of the coming comedown, the drab reality underpinning the urge for escape and abandon. At the Usher Hall, some three decades since both band and audience were living this music in the first flush of exploration, the mayhem ‘Born Slippy’ provoked felt both poignant and cathartic. Hyde marked the moment by dusting off his most venerable dance moves.

Over at the Traverse, This is Memorial Device ended with Higgins in a trance-like slow dance with nothing but his own bittersweet memories, chanting a half-remembered mantra from some half-remembered gig: ‘Yes! Who? We.’ He clung to it like an old lover, grasping for confirmation that it all meant something in the end. Among the web of emotions embedded in the act of listening to the music we loved most intensely when we were young, the ache of what has been lost is rarely far away.