Enigma

By: Paul Lessane

As the driving force behind German band Enigma, Micheal Cretu has spent the majority of his 18-year-long career as a recording artist creating some of the most culturally diverse music on the planet…but it’s not without avail. With more than 40 million albums sold worldwide, 50 number-one chart positions, and 100 platinum sales around the world, Enigma is Germany’s most successful export in the last 20 years. Enigma has always had a by-the-wayside reputation. For music as spiritually diverse and unique, it’s almost a shame to see a flower growing up from proud and strong from the concrete, only to get run over by a school of rush hour traffic. To be realistic, there isn’t much use of complaining that more of this kind of music does not exist. I know — the moody atmospheric backdrops coupled with exotic ethnic vocals brings a question to the fore of your mind that makes you want to ask more. It’s sad, really, but although there may not be enough of this kind of food to go around the table family style at 6:00, you could always find solace in a world without justice by leaning over your bed at night and ringing up the next best thing — world music.  

Enter the seventh studio album, aptly entitled Seven Lives Many Faces. Recorded over a period of 11 months, Cretu secluded himself with a sonic palette of 400,000 sounds to create the perfect headphone album…and it shows. While the message of Enigma music has always been the same, this time around  there’s a lot more to shake a camera at on tour here at Enigma acres. From the album’s beginning, you notice that Gregarian chants of past albums have been replaced with spoken word exclamations and hip-hop beat box. On the opening track, “Encounters,” a heartbeat-laden spoken word regret rides the wave of an atmospheric rainstorm. 

Throughout the album’s 47 minutes of moral latitude and spiritual eroticism, you find the music to be a vehicle that escapes the fact that, although the lyrics are not too prolific, the sanctity of the music is asylum enough to allow yourself not to be disappointed. The focus of Enigma’s proverbial instrument is to translate music into feelings by using sounds to shuffle your emotions. One example of the album’s innovation is the addition of a 60-year-old female Ibiza vocalist on two of the album’s best-produced tracks, the relentless, explanatory stomp of “La Puerta del Cielo,” and the mournful regret of “Between Generations” — both spoken in the Catalan dialect. Enigma closes the album with the appropriately titled, groove-based affirmation of “The Language of Sound,” After listening to Enigma, when you really think about it, you realize one thing: that music like this is so one-of-a-kind that its stock is far too explanatory in and of itself to ever be improved upon. It never really gets any better than this, so there you have it. Friends, purchase it at once; enemies, avoid it like the plague; but to anybody out there who’s curious, I suggest they find themselves a reason and jump right on in. The water’s fine.