Boom Boom Satellites

Did You Know?

• They toured the US with Moby for three months.
• Kawashima was married to actress Risa Sudou, and they had two daughters.

History

Kawashima and Nakano met in college and started Boom Boom Satellites in 1990. They took their name from a Sigue Sigue Sputnik song, as they once explained in an interview. The duo first made their mark in Japan in 1995, when a track of theirs appeared on a compilation put out by Torema Records, a label linked to Untitled Records. That same year, the Belgian imprint R&S Records dropped their debut single in Europe. The pair got a write-up in the British music weekly Melody Maker, which praised them as a cross between The Chemical Brothers and The Prodigy. R&S put out their first album, 7 Ignitions/Auto Re-Birth, on April 1, 1998, and they played a major festival that June before heading back to Japan. Later on, they spent three months touring the United States with Moby, and bands like Garbage asked them to do remixes.

The group has placed songs in movies, ads, and TV shows. In 2004, several tracks from their album Full of Elevating Pleasures ended up on the soundtrack for the CGI anime Appleseed. The next year, the song "What Goes Around Comes Around" from Exposed was used in a Dodge commercial, and "Easy Action" appeared on the soundtrack for the 2007 anime Vexille. Also in 2007, they performed at the In The City festival in the UK. In 2008, "Scatterin' Monkey" from their 1998 record Out Loud was heard in The Dark Knight, while "Shut Up and Explode" became the opening theme for the PlayStation Store exclusive and later TV anime Xam'd: Lost Memories. In 2009, the single "Back on My Feet" was added as a second opening theme for the show's TV broadcast, which alternated between the two songs.

That same year, Boom Boom Satellites teamed up with Tahj Mowry and Flo Rida for a reworked version of their track "Kick It Out." The new take kept the original chorus but used Mowry and Flo Rida's lyrics for the verses, and the band also wrote a fresh verse that wasn't on the first release. A music video came out to promote it. Also in 2009, they contributed a remix of Fact's song "A Fact of Life" to that band's album of the same name.