Nine years ago, at the launch of Fabric in a former Victorian storage facility in London, all the talk was of the unisex toilets (“very Ally McBeal”) and the strange new wooden Bodysonic dancefloor, with speakers underneath enabling you to “hear” the music through your body. Last weekend, the club’s founders, Keith Reilly and Cameron Leslie, launched their second London venue, Matter, at the O2, the former Millennium Dome site in east London.

Matter is entirely purpose-built, but there are similarities to its little sister (“little” because, at nearly 33,000 sq ft, Matter is considerably roomier).

The unisex toilets are back, as is the vaguely industrial feel — but where Fabric was all exposed brickwork, Matter is a three-storey riot of concrete. Empty, it’s clinical, cold and about as plush and welcoming as a holding cell. There’s another wooden dancefloor, too, dropped between the stage and the DJ booth. It looks strangely out of place amid all that grey, like a splinter in a finger.

It’s called Bodykinetic and is the masterwork of Dave Parry and Luke Pepper, of Djenerate, who installed the one at Fabric and have spent the past nine years trying to better it. Three inches under the sprung flooring are 75 1,000-watt transducers, which transmit bass frequencies up through your feet. And this is where it all gets technical.

“Your brain is taking information in from your ears, but also from your body, as the sound vibrates up through your legs and spine,” Parry says.

“It’s hard to describe, but it’s a real feelgood thing. If you’re in a church and they play a big chord on the organ, the hairs on the back of your neck stand up, because there are certain frequencies that produce that feeling of euphoria. We’ve managed to find those frequencies.”

At the launch party, the floor is rumbling. In the name of research, I rope in the girl next to me and we sit in front of the stage. “Oooh,” says Ade, a 24-year-old paralegal. “The vibrations go a long way.” I don’t quite know what she means by that, but, encouraged, I lie down flat. It feels a little like being in an apartment while the neighbours downstairs are having a party.

The following night is the first time the system is properly put through its paces. “We didn’t really fire it up yesterday,” says Parry, mad-scientist-like, from the DJ booth, which controls the lights, sound and video projection.

Once it all gets going, you understand why nobody thought to buy a few pictures to brighten up the walls. The entire internal surface area of the club has been designed as a canvas, allowing projections to spiral everywhere, including the bottom of the bridge that bisects the third-floor VIP area.

It’s a techno-nerd’s paradise — I fully expect to see a bunch of men with ponytails standing next to the booth, stroking it. “There are crazy things you can do,” Pepper says. “You could have a noise — a squeak, for example — and a visual of a mouse, then have the two things running around the room together. It’s an incredible environment to do a show, and it’s up to the artists and the DJs to see if they can step up to it.”

So, can they? The music policy is a mix of big-name DJs — Carl Cox, Sasha, John Digweed, Mylo — and dance-friendly bands such as Reverend and the Makers. First on the bill for the live launch night are the LA funk-rappers Iglu & Hartly, who prance around barefoot in vest and shorts, gleefully delivering their single In This City.

Back at the control centre, the floor is turned up a notch as the English electro four-piece Late of the Pier break into their opener, Space and the Woods. They look slightly overawed, like a bunch of teenagers on a school trip to the Science Museum, but it sounds tight. The vibrations reach ankle level. “We want to keep something back for Unkle,” Parry grins.

And they do. Halfway through their set, Unkle’s James Lavelle and Pablo Clements launch into Broken, from last year’s War Stories album, and the rolling bassline goes up my shins and into my thighs.

Whatever happens, Metallica cannot be allowed to play here. We’d all be jelly.

Despite the promises, Ian Brown fails to show for his guest spot, but instead there’s a rousing version of Reign, the 2004 single featuring the former Stone Roses front man, with Brown’s heavy-browed visage glaring off the walls and ceiling.

Remarkably, even though he’s worked with enough vocalists in his time to have picked up a thing or two — and the Cult’s Ian Astbury, Gavin Clark, from Clayhill, and Lisa Lindley Jones all get up and do their bit — Lavelle has all the rock’n’roll charisma of a recently retired vicar. When he takes to the mic in his shades to drone, “This is a dance club, let’s go”, in a dull monotone, half the crowd yawns in unison.

Fortunately, Unkle live are about more than just Lavelle, and the band are ably enhanced by Matter’s sound system, which is as good as it gets: shudderingly loud but without distortion, meaning your ears barely ring, much less bleed. Judging by the mosh pit, Parry’s euphoria frequencies are working fine, too.

If the venue performs as it is designed to, half the fun of coming here will be seeing what kind of package the acts can come up with. “Unless you were Pink Floyd or U2, you couldn’t afford to put on this kind of stage show,” Pepper says.

“Now, if you have the vision, you can do something absolutely breathtaking.”

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