Enigma "Sadeness Part 1"... the song that will never fucking die...

My parents would listen to their first three albums a lot when I was a kid (presumably the fact that Michael Crețu is Romanian had something to do with it) but I can't remember a single thing about them other than NEW AGE.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Ib7g_6PywA

hugely enjoyable, but not exactly new age is it ?

I'd never heard that one before but it's pure nostalgia bait nonetheless.

Diminishing returns on Enigma records, but I think 3/4 of Cross of Changes is great

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z18HWWX6yYM

This is really weird and confounded me when I was 10!

sade can i get your sister email why because she look intersting

― NAthaniel, Friday, July 8, 2005 3:32 PM (fifteen years ago) bookmarkflaglink

OMG, The Voice and The Snake, like do you know how much joy that brought to a 20 y.o. goth who used to sit in the back pews of their mother's church and read Revelations during mass as a teenager.

One of the two Enigma dudes had an entire massive number one hit career before Enigma. He is a very, very wealthy dude. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sULN3U1NjlI

Were there really "two Enigma dudes"? I thought Michael Cretu was always the main driving force behind the project, and according to Wikipedia Cornelius was only involved in Enigma from 1993 to 1996.

Cretu himself, of course, also had a fairly successful career before Enigma as a songwriter and keyboard player for the woman whom he'd eventually marry:

https://youtu.be/4jjzu1Z2RZc

The whole point of Enigma for Cretu was keeping the performers and producers behind it obscured, enigmatic if you will. But Cornelius is one of the few participants he's admitted to, and his name is all over their publishing. Also Cornelius' wealth since the 90s far exceeds what German-language pop stars generally have.

I always find it amazing, like the ways in which Euro pop and UK pop intersect, and don't?

Like, I also hang out on a messageboard for a German-language band where at least half the users are German, Austrian, etc. and many, many times, they'll mention someone who is massive, huge, like Cliff Richard-level, even their grandparents know who they are, well-known in German-language markets, but I either think of them as an obscure one-hit-wonder, or I've literally never heard of them.

I'm used to the way that US / UK ideas of who/what was "massive" does not always translate. But it is genuinely eye-opening, discovering how little exposure we get to continental pop, beyond the occasional "summer holiday jam" that somehow makes it across.

Is Peter Schilling a big deal in the German-language market? "Major Tom (Coming Home)" is so cool, I've always wondered why he never made the international charts again.

a Dutch TV programme did an interview with Schilling recently on his big hit and how it impacted his life:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YoJZvD39M_A

His German page on Wikipedia suggests he has about a dozen more albums and multiple other singles (and says that he suffered "burnout" after his international success) so it would seem that he was far more well-known at home.

(I always love when I go to Wiki and the English page is like 3 sentences and the German page has like 20 subsections of information.)

x-post

some of the above is addressed in the interview I linked

Out of curiosity, was there ever a "Sadness Part 2"?

― I Named Veal (nordicskilla), Friday, July 8, 2005 9:36 PM (fifteen years ago)

Question got answered in 2016:

https://youtu.be/HHdylh210Ho

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HHdylh210Ho

I was listening to an apple radio "lisa gerrard & similar artists" station and the intro to the album was one of the tracks, which kinda highlights how auto-generated "stations" are inevitably gonna fuck up (the first track on MCMXD being a spoken "relax and listen to this album" thing, very of its day)

the specific nostalgia of the techno-dance-electronic music of this era is incredibly rich and also beyond that the record was always a very cool pop record

now playing: the rest of MCMXC in a dark hotel where I've been living for a week

I recently became aware of the Sarah MacLachlan collected dance remixes album, which is not quite that specific nostalgia (in either time or affect), but also not a million miles away. Someone more knowledgeable than me could probably trace some throughlines.

The Sarah McLachlan/Delirium track is the exact vibe of the first Enigma album imo, if many years later

Oh wow you're so right! I think I had only ever heard the epic trance remix of that one, but the original hits

now playing: the rest of MCMXC in a dark hotel where I've been living for a week

A fine approach. And it is a good album. I stand by my old AMG review from the late 90s. (I think that and the Enya reviews I did flummoxed a few folks back then but time has further justified my thoughts.)

Joan Crawford Loves Chachi, dancing nude like Silence of the Lambs' Buffalo Bill.

One of my favorite memories is closing all the shades and playing this album in the dark while my friends and I laid on the carpet of my parents’ family room. No drugs were involved.

Right before Delerium went the full McLachlan there was a song on Semantic Spaces, "Flatlands," that was uhhh a bit more than just "inspired by" that Sadeness sound. Love it, though.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PABYxXkCJUg

Probably the origin of my love of pan flute/pan pipes in techno