Enigma is an electronic musical project started by Michael Cretu, David Fairstein and Frank Peterson in 1990. Cretu is both the composer and the producer; his wife Sandra often provides vocals on Enigma tracks. The pair have also worked together under the name Sandra. Six studio albums have been produced under the name of the project.
From the late 1970s onwards, Michael Cretu already had his own music career on his hands and apart from several collaboration efforts with several other musicians, he also produced his wife's albums. Before Enigma, he released a number of albums under his own name, but none of them sold particularly well. Cretu revealed in an interview that he believed that his ideas were soon running out at that point.
It was then that Cretu plotted the creation of a "New age-Dance", un-named yet, first single. Ditching his old habits and rules, he headed onto a different direction and in December 1990, after 8 months of preparations, he came up with the project's groundbreaking debut album, MCMXC a.D. (received over 60 platinum awards worldwide). The album was Cretu's first commercial success through the single "Sadeness (Part I)", which juxtaposed Gregorian chants and sexual overtones over a dance beat that was highly peculiar to the ears of the public at that time. Cretu explained that the album was about unsolved crimes and philosophical themes such as life after death, hence the name Enigma. He had previously used a Gregorian-type chant on the opening seconds of Sandra's 1987 single "Everlasting Love", without integrating them into other parts of the song. "Sadeness" quickly rose to the top of the charts in Germany and France; it went on to become an almost worldwide hit. Later Cretu would claim that the now signature Enigma sound was inspired after falling asleep on the London Underground.
Before the album was released, Cretu was cautious of the response towards the upcoming album, decided to forgo mentioning his and most of the personnel's real name and credited himself as Curly M.C., while the album sleeve contained little information about the background of the project, furthering the mystery about the creators of the album and leading to speculation whether Enigma was a band, a person or a group.
In 1993, Cretu was given an offer by producers to compose the full soundtrack of the motion picture Sliver but he was unable to accept the offer. Instead, he came up with "Carly's Song" and "Carly's Loneliness", which was used in the movie and credited in the motion picture soundtrack as well.
In the same year, The Cross of Changes was released and it received about the same, if not an even larger and better response from the public (it sold 6 million copies in a year). However, both of the albums also hitched up lawsuits over the issue of sampling from other music sources.
In 1996, Le Roi Est Mort, Vive Le Roi! (French for "The King is dead, long live the king!") was released. Cretu's idea was that this third album was the child of the previous two albums, and therefore included familiar elements of Gregorian chants and tribal chants in it. Though the album was as meticulously crafted by Cretu as the earlier two albums, it failed to achieve the same level of success that they enjoyed. As a result only two of the three singles originally slated were released, with the third one ("The Roundabout") being silently cancelled in 1998.
The 1999 release of The Screen Behind the Mirror included samples from Carl Orff's Carmina Burana on four tracks on the album. This time the Gregorian chants were toned down a lot, but still Shakuhachi flutes and other traditional Enigma signatures remain. Only "Gravity of Love" and "Push the Limits" were released as singles from the album. Ruth-Ann Boyle from the band Olive and also Andru Donalds mark their first appearance on the Enigma project.
In 2001, Cretu released a new single called "Turn Around" together with Love Sensuality Devotion: The Greatest Hits and Love Sensuality Devotion: The Remix Collection to end what he considers to be the first chapter of Enigma. A light show was held at the Munich Planetarium in conjunction of the release of the compilation albums.
2003's Voyageur was considered by many to be a total makeover for the project. Practically all of the prominent Enigma signature elements (the ethnic and/or Gregorian chants, the famous Shakuhachi flutes) were no longer in use for this album. As a result many fans had difficulty appreciating this new direction and sales were affected. From a statistical point of view, every Enigma studio album to date has sold roughly half of what the previous release did.
On August 28, 2005, Enigma's management (Crocodile-Music.de) announced the release of the project's latest single, "Hello and Welcome". The single was originally slated to be released in October, however it was moved to November 25, 2005 and finally saw release in Germany on March 10, 2006. The song will also be the walk-in music for the German boxer, Felix Sturm, and much like Voyageur shows little similarity to earlier Enigma works.
On September 26, 2006, Enigma's sixth album A Posteriori was released worldwide, containing a new version of "Hello and Welcome" and the new song "Goodbye Milky Way", which, despite earlier announcements, was and will not be released as a single. The album is more techno, electronic, than any previous one. The concept is based on such sciences as astronomy, physics, history and sociology.[citation needed]
A DVD version of A Posteriori was released on December 16, 2006. The DVD features kaleidoscope images in synchronization with the multi channel remastered music.
In late March 2007, a special "Private Lounge Remix" album version of A Posteriori was released on the Apple iTunes music store. This compilation includes 12 new remixed tracks from the album by artists such as Boca Junior, Tocadisco, etc. Some of these tracks were available previously on the original A Posteriori iTunes album and on the abovementioned DVD release.
'Shadows in Silence' is from the "Le Roi Est Mort, Vive Le Roi!" album.
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