When electronic act Enigma invaded the airwaves in 1990, no one could describe their music’s enchantment. The religious and erotic blended with sampling reminiscent of Jean-Michel Jarre, emanating an irresistible scent of sin. “What is this tunes?” Bob Mack wrote in Spin journal. “Umberto Eco reading his will work on major of a backbeat?”
Trustworthy to their name, Enigma created a space for the mysterious and the forbidden to prosper, at some point securing a recreation-switching track record in dance tunes while at the same time reinventing the new-age genre. The mastermind behind the band was Michael Cretu, a Romanian-German musician whose credits bundled actively playing keyboards on Boney M’s Rivers of Babylon, co-making Mike Oldfield’s Islands and crafting instantaneous hits these types of as Maria Magdalena for his then wife, the German synthpop star Sandra.
It was soon after experimenting with Gregorian chants on Sandra’s model of Everlasting Like that Cretu decided to check out this route further. Retiring to his Art Studios in Ibiza with producers Frank Peterson and Fabrice Cuitad, he conceived the sound of Enigma, combining worldbeat, ambient and electronica with imagery evoking the religious and profane.
The consequence was MCMXC a.D., a 40-minute function as extreme as a ritual of demonic invocation. The album went triple-platinum in the Uk, sold 4m copies in the US and topped the charts globally.
The controversy it sparked did not harm, possibly. The backwards chanting and lyrical references to the Marquis de Sade ended up blasphemous plenty of for the Vatican to ban the solitary Sadeness (Part I) from the radio stations it managed, a go that must have delighted both the label and Cretu himself after all, you can not invest in publicity like that.
MCMXC a.D. propelled a revolution within the new-age market, which until eventually then had been typically ploughing the prog terrain. As DJs carried the gospel ahead, the album became an indisputable pioneer of the genre’s crossover to 90s rave and Eurodance lifestyle, with Ace of Base’s 1992 breakthrough Satisfied Nation remaining a prime illustration. Enigma’s legacy also endures: in 2016 their eighth album, The Drop of a Rebel Angel, entered Billboard’s Dance/Electronica chart at No 1 – the exact same year Prospect the Rapper sampled Enigma in his demo of Kanye West’s Waves.
Uncertainties on whether or not MCMXC a.D. was mere beginner’s luck before long dissipated when Enigma adopted it up with the inescapable Return to Innocence, replacing the Gregorian chants with buoyant rhythms and numerology-primarily based lyrics. “[These are] music for meditation or copulation, whichever just one you favor,” journalist Staci Bonner wrote. The magic of Enigma lies exactly in inciting the two concurrently.
Enigma’s The Full Studio Assortment is out now