Atomic Dance Explosion

About the track

Alexander (DjC) finished the track on the night of 7 November 1998, according to the band's biography of June 2000, and the band released it on MP3.com that day, in MP3 and RealAudio, as a song "based on our new sound". The biography says the two thought it "a pretty fair one, neither good or bad", and that it entered MP3.com's overall Top 40 within a week; the band's biography of 2005 gives December 1998 as its production date. On MP3.com the band called it a 150 BPM progressive house, trance and techno song, credited the bass drums to the software Stomper and thanked Clavia for the Nord Rack synthesizer.^2,1,3,4

In January 1999 the band reported the track at No. 9 on the MP3.com Top 40, with the Beastie Boys still ahead, and its songs page of 10 March had it at No. 2 on MP3.com's techno chart and No. 8 on the Top 40. On 25 March the band announced that it had hit No. 1, writing that 57,000 downloads in 24 days made the band No. 1 within all genres on MP3.com. It reported the track at No. 1 again in November 1999. In June 2000 the band wrote that it had been on the Top 40 for over 82 weeks without dropping out; the 2005 biography says it held the No. 1 spot for over three months and spent 81 weeks in a row on the Top 40, after which the band took it off its page because it no longer represented their sound.^1,5,6,2,3

In May 1999 the band announced a new version, a vocal mix with Meilani, an R&B singer from Oakland, California, and reported that the BBC programme Tomorrow's World had featured the track; its MP3.com profile dates that first TV airplay to 25 April 1999. The biography of 2000 adds that the track was nominated for "Song of the year" at the end of 1999. On 27 December 2000 WennE re-produced it as the Millenium RMX, which the band called a remake "to celebrate the real shift of millenium (2000 - 2001)".^7,4,2,8

In November 2003 Alexander wrote that a "Starcraft edit" of the track was not made by the band. In 2012 Atomic Dance Explosion was one of the remastered old tracks on the band's Bandcamp album Lost and Found.^9,10

In their words

“The name has its own meaning. This is a killer! 150 Bpm Progressive House/Trance/Techno song with a monster beat!”

“They both kind of thought that the track was a pretty fair one, neither good or bad, just fair.”

Watch and listen

On the band's forum

• b e y o n d . 2 0 0 0 XIII · 15 Oct 2003 · 7 posts