Enigma

On December 10, 1990, Michael Cretu, aided by a team of collaborators, unleashed "MCMXC a.D.", the debut album by Enigma. In retrospect, the impact of that record can be singled out as the single event that, more than any other, marked the shift from Eighties music to that of the Nineties, at least within genres built on electronic arrangements.

The instrumental skeleton devised by Cretu rests on the fusion of a particular beat with a specific atmosphere. The result, unheard of at the time, brought together worlds that had until then been fairly distant from one another, and it went on to become massively influential.

Of course, Enigma's beat — that trademark shuffle built with the semi-analogue Roland TR-909 drum machine, more or less syncopated depending on the track — wasn't invented by Cretu out of thin air. His idea arrived at the peak of a series of rhythms that had been pushing in that direction for years, probably precisely because of how widespread Roland's gear had become.

In March 1989, Soul II Soul released the landmark single "Keep On Movin'", while two months later it was Neneh Cherry's turn with "Manchild". These two tracks contain the two extremes that would later merge into Enigma's beat: the syncopated yet fluid groove, and the one shot through with breakbeats. One had its roots in dance music (house, to be precise), the other in hip hop: what linked them, beyond their shared black music DNA, was the relative laid-back feel of both grooves (it's no coincidence that these two tracks always come up whenever people talk about the forerunners of downtempo and trip hop).

As for Enigma's atmosphere, some ancestors can be traced there too, though this time a bit more loosely. One might think of the earliest tracks built on electronic rhythm and wall-to-wall keyboards, with dreamy, relaxing textures: Jan Hammer's "Crockett's Theme", from the "Miami Vice" soundtrack, or Art Of Noise's "Moments In Love", both dating from 1984 but still echoing vividly in the minds of anyone tinkering with electronics — especially someone like Cretu, who was recording in Ibiza, where that kind of music was played on constant rotation in the clubs.

The context, however, was completely different: Hammer conceived "Crockett's Theme" as background music for a TV show set in an urban environment, while Cretu used those same intuitions to describe a journey into the unconscious. With Cretu, and with the huge success of his project, the idea took hold that danceable rhythms and meditative music could be blended together.

Though starting from intuitions borrowed from elsewhere on both fronts, Cretu thus set in motion a revolution: in one stroke, new age discovered the commercial power of the drum machine, and downtempo electronics stopped being a defining element of certain black music, becoming not just a genre in its own right but a universal formula applicable to the most disparate situations. One that would immediately invade recording studios and cast its long shadow over much of Nineties pop music, in every corner of the world. Even in Italy: the instrumental backbone of Mango's "Giulietta" is a slightly softer version of it, and the same goes, once you lift the cocktail-bar veneer, for the drums on Luca Carboni's "Mare mare". These are among the last names you'd expect to read in an article about Enigma, but they won't be the only ones.

All of this, however, concerns only the rhythms and keyboard backdrops. The album's influence proves even more far-reaching when you look at the rest of the recipe: the Japanese flutes, the Gregorian chants, the ambient noises, the peculiar guitar tone.

It's clear, for instance, that "Lifeforms" by Future Sound Of London owes something to this album, at least in approach, since it was the first to demonstrate the possibility of combining dance, ambient, found sounds and exotic instruments. Just as it's telling that even one of the founders of new age music, Mike Oldfield, ended up following its lead on an album like "The Songs Of Distant Earth" (it's true that Cretu had already produced one of his tracks, "The Time Has Come", but that was back in 1987, when Enigma's sound was still a long way off).

Without the shift brought about by Cretu, projects like Era and Deep Forest would have been simply unthinkable (some cynics might say that would have been for the best, but these are artists who have sold millions of records); perhaps even Moby's "Play" wouldn't have been what we know it as, while Moby... wait, and Schiller's records would have ended up in more conventional electropop and dance territory. And for what it's worth, compilations like "Pure Moods" - important for having brought new age spirituality to a mass audience - would have lost their star band (the only one featured on every volume).

The development of recording techniques would also have been considerably slowed: "MCMXC a.D." was one of the very first albums recorded entirely on hard disk; the unusual use of samples, some lasting tens of seconds, was a bolt from the blue at a time when techno, house and hip hop dominated the technique with their short fragments looped ad libitum; and the guitars, inherently saturated and distorted, were smoothed out in the mixing stage and made radio-friendly, stripped of the violent impact usually associated with that tone (the rock instrument par excellence was thus completely recontextualized).

Before reaching this landmark achievement, however, Cretu went through a very long apprenticeship, starting in Germany in the Seventies as a session musician, working among others for Boney M. A series of solo albums followed that are largely forgotten today, with the sole exception of the single "Samurai", a little gem of the campest synth-pop, dating back to 1985. That same year he produced "The Long Play" for pop singer Sandra, who would become his wife in 1988 and with whom he would go on to found Enigma.

The transcultural context probably influenced the choice to draw samples from the most disparate sources: Cretu was born and raised in Romania, Sandra is German, as was Frank Peterson (already a keyboardist on Sandra's records and in charge of sampling in the new project), while Fabrice Cuitad, who wrote the lyrics for three tracks, is French (for the record, back in the Seventies he had fronted Droids, a somewhat cult space disco band).

The album seems to almost emerge from the fog: "The Voice Of Enigma" flows with ethereal keyboard tones and what sounds like a foghorn (originally, on Leftfield's "Not Forgotten", it was more readily recognizable as a saxophone), as if to orient the listener within the hazy space conjured up by the music. A female voice then enters, that of Louisa Stanley (not a musician, but a Virgin Records executive), who, in a sort of fourth-wall break, invites the listener to relax in order to best enjoy the work they're about to hear.

It's a brief introduction that flows straight into "Principles Of Lust", an almost twelve-minute suite made up of the two parts of "Sadeness" and the interlude "Find Love". The first segment of "Sadeness" is the one that would be released as the lead single, titled "Sadeness Part I", and it would turn Enigma into a worldwide phenomenon. It opens with an antiphon sung by a Gregorian choir, taken from a 1977 anthology curated by German musicologist and conductor Konrad Ruhland. The sampled excerpt is so long that Sony, the label holding rights to the original recording, would sue Cretu in 1994, receiving a monetary settlement (the songwriting credit for "Sadeness" nonetheless remained entirely with Enigma, since the antiphon was material over a thousand years old).

While the choir is still deep in prayer, the iconic beat kicks in, linking meditation and dance, spirit and body, church and nightclub. In a first instrumental break, the sound of a shakuhachi (traditional Japanese flute) enters, reproduced on a synthesizer, lending that impression of ethnic music so typical of much new age. Then come Sandra's voice, sighing as if in the throes of passion, and a male voice reciting the thoughts of the Marquis de Sade in French (it has never been revealed who this was: perhaps Cuitad himself?), alternating with the return of the Gregorian choir and the shakuhachi.

It's striking to think that a song with such idiosyncratic sounds, sung entirely in Latin and French no less, went to number 1 in Britain, France, Italy, Germany and many other countries, even securing a spot in the notoriously tough American top 5.

"Sadeness" flows into "Find Love", with a crystalline piano part that sounds like the blueprint for much of the trance music released during the Nineties, and a more danceable section, with synthesized brass stabs accompanying the drum machine. The reprise of "Sadeness" seems to merge the two preceding tracks, combining the structure of one with the piano intro of the other. While in the album's first edition the three pieces were contained within a single track, on some reissues they have been separated, though still listed on the sleeve under the title "Principles Of Lust".

"Callas Went Away" is the album's atmospheric ballad, the one closest to the aforementioned "Moments In Love". Maria Callas's voice actually appears for a few moments, sampled from a performance of Jules Massenet's "Werther".

"Mea culpa" is a new variation on "Sadeness", but with a more martial rhythm, likely due to the lyrics: while "Sadeness" highlighted the contrast between faith (the antiphon) and sexual desire (de Sade's lines), "Mea culpa" brings in guilt and punishment. The accusations of blasphemy leveled at the two tracks at the time seem naive today (and back then they also amounted to quite a bit of free publicity), but there's no doubt that the lyrics and the arrangement of the samples aimed to expose Christianity's struggle to reconcile morality with carnal desire.

"The Voice & The Snake" pays direct homage to Vangelis, one of the giants of new age music: over a backdrop of dissonant synthesizers, the spoken voices from "Seven Bowls" by Aphrodite's Child appear (from "666", one of the masterpieces of progressive rock, itself an album deeply tied to the depiction of Christian sacred texts).

"Knocking On Forbidden Doors" features another Gregorian chant, the Marian hymn "Salve regina" (it's not known which recording it's taken from), but also the shortest sample on the record, a single word that couldn't be more meaningful: "Mother" (the voice belongs to Sinead O'Connor, from "I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got"). It's repeated several times, amid the distorted guitar roars manipulated as described earlier.

The album closes with the suite "Back To The Rivers Of Belief", divided into three acts. The first two, "Way To Eternity" and "Hallelujah", serve mainly as introductions (one is ambient and quotes the famous theme from "Close Encounters of the Third Kind", the other is rhythmic and features an unidentified voice that seems to be chanting something in the style of Islamic devotional song).

The centerpiece is "The Rivers Of Belief", the only track sung by Cretu, and one might say the only track sung according to the conventions of modern pop music, with a passionate tone vaguely reminiscent of American arena-rock vocalists, though mixed at a noticeably lower volume than usual. Here too we find the classic beat, the shakuhachi and the atmospheric keyboards, while to ensure a sense of cyclicality, in a loop of death and rebirth, it fades out on the notes of Leftfield's saxophone, where it had all begun.

Launched with great fanfare by Virgin, the album went on to reach number 1 in Britain and the top 10 in most European countries (Italy included, at number 7). The real coup, however, came in the United States: the record initially reached number 6 there, a respectable placing, but one that gave no hint of the 282 weeks it would go on to spend on the Billboard chart - and in an era when bestsellers stayed on the charts for far shorter periods than they do today (a span now stretched enormously by the decline in physical sales and the dominance of streaming). It entered the chart in March 1991 and remained there until the summer of 1996: only Metallica's black album, during that decade, proved equally durable.

To date, "MCMXC a.D." has sold around fifteen million copies worldwide, not counting its performance in the digital market (on YouTube alone, "Sadeness" and "Mea culpa" rack up sixteen million views every year).

A result based purely on the album's content, given that Cretu chose to keep a low profile, disguising himself even in the sleeve credits, where he appears under the name Curly M.C., just as Peterson and Cuitad became F. Gregorian and David Fairstein respectively. For Sandra the question didn't even arise: since she hadn't written any of the material, she was simply left out. A kind of phantom band, one that nevertheless revealed its secret when the video for "The Rivers Of Belief" came out, showing Cretu's face on several occasions. Not that this turned him into a rock star: to this day, despite a prestigious career, the artist prefers to stay out of the spotlight. It's to his credit, considering he could boast of being one of the greatest pioneers of electronic music.

Thanks to Simon Cummings, Damiano Pandolfini and Marco Sgrignoli for their input and suggestions.

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15/09/2019