ATB

André Tanneberger — better known by the initials ATB — was born on 26 February 1973 in Freiberg, in what was then East Germany. His parents moved the family west in 1984, and in the late 1980s the teenage Tanneberger began frequenting the Tarm Center club in Bochum, where DJ Thomas Kukula (General Base) was an early influence. His first production project, Sequential One — named after the Sequential Pro One synth he was working on — released the debut single "Let Me Hear You" in February 1993 and ran across two albums through 1998 before the lineup dissolved. The solo ATB project launched at the very end of 1998 with "9 PM (Till I Come)," released by Kontor Records in Germany on 26 October 1998 (and through Radikal Records in North America). The lead synth — an unmistakable rapid-pluck riff that pop history tends to remember as an acoustic guitar — went to #1 on the UK Singles Chart and the Irish Singles Chart and into the top ten across Australia, Italy, Norway, Denmark and Greece. It established the post-"Children" template for melodic-trance crossover: warm, mid-tempo, instantly hummable, and engineered to live on daytime radio as comfortably as a club closing slot. The debut album Movin' Melodies (1999) extended it with "Don't Stop!" and a trance reworking of Adamski & Seal's "Killer." ATB's catalogue is unusually deep for a producer most casual listeners know through one track. Two Worlds (2000) used a double-CD club / chillout split that became a personal format; Dedicated (2002), Addicted to Music (2003), No Silence (2004), and the seven-album Trilogy / Future Memories arc carried him through the 2000s as a fixture of DJ Mag's Top 100. He runs his own ATB Studio operation and Sony / Kontor distribution; the 2021 collaboration "Your Love (9PM)" with Topic and A7S reactivated the original "9 PM" hook and entered the top ten in eighteen countries, returning him to global charts twenty-three years after the source single.