Energy 52 — Café Del Mar (Three 'N One Remix)

If classic trance has a national anthem, Café Del Mar is it. Kid Paul and Cosmic Baby cut the original in 1993 as a slow, weightless arpeggio; four years later Three 'N One welded that same melody to a 138 BPM peak-time chassis and turned it into the record you play last. It has been officially remixed by Michael Woods, Nalin & Kane, Deadmau5 and Marco V, and unofficially bootlegged more times than anyone has counted. Play the first four bars in a room of trance fans and every conversation stops.

Energy 52 was a one-off collaboration between Berlin techno lifers Kid Paul and Cosmic Baby, cut for Maas Publishing (MFS) in 1993. The pair wrote the melody in a single afternoon at Cosmic Baby's Ku'damm studio, reportedly inspired by a Balearic sunset both had witnessed the previous summer at the actual Café del Mar bar in San Antonio, Ibiza. The original 1993 pressing is a slow, dubby 128 BPM cut — closer to Detroit techno than to trance — and initially sold in the low four figures.

The famous lead is a Roland JD-800 patch layered with a Yamaha DX7 electric-piano bell, arpeggiated in F# minor across a rolling sixteenth-note pattern. Three 'N One (UK producers Ian 'Sav' Standerline and Peran van Dijk) rebuilt the record in 1997 for Red Jerry's Hooj Choons imprint, transposing the arp up, tightening it to 138 BPM, and adding the now-iconic sub-bass drop that arrives exactly 3:44 into the extended mix. The breakdown strips everything but the JD-800 and a lone reverb tail — the single most-copied breakdown template in trance.

The 1997 Three 'N One remix reached #27 on the UK Singles Chart on re-release, but its real life happened in clubs — Cream, Gatecrasher, Renaissance and Twilo all treated it as an untouchable closer for the next six years. Mixmag ranked it the #1 dance record of all time in a 2011 subscriber poll; DJ Mag has listed it in every 'Greatest Dance Tracks Ever' feature it has run since 2001.

• UK Singles Chart (1997 remix)#27
• German Dance Chart#3

• 0:00The four-note arpeggio enters solo — no drums for eight bars.
• 3:44The sub-bass drop the entire trance genre subsequently copied.
• 5:30Full breakdown to the JD-800 lead alone before the final drop.

• Original Mix (1993)

  Kid Paul & Cosmic Baby's slow, dubby 128 BPM version on MFS.

• Three 'N One Remix (1997)

  The definitive 138 BPM peak-time cut. Hooj Choons.

• Nalin & Kane Remix (1998)

  Progressive-house reinterpretation; standard in Sasha sets.

• Michael Woods Remix (2002)

  Harder, later-era peak-time weapon.

• Deadmau5 Remix (2013)

  A rare reverent reworking; slower, deeper, more Detroit.

There are, credibly, more than 60 officially licensed remixes across three decades — Nalin & Kane, Michael Woods, Marco V, Deadmau5 (2013), Paul Oakenfold (2019), and Solomun (2022) among them. Every subsequent 'progressive trance climax' — from Sasha & Digweed's Northern Exposure to Eric Prydz's Opus — traces its architecture back to this record's breakdown-to-drop ratio.

• The Three 'N One remix was cut in a single 14-hour session in a converted Sheffield garage.
• Kid Paul never DJed the record himself; he retired from clubs before the 1997 remix hit.
• Deadmau5 tweeted in 2013 that Café Del Mar was 'the reason I make dance music at all.'