When electronic act Enigma invaded the airwaves in 1990, nobody could explain their music’s appeal. The spiritual and erotic blended with sampling reminiscent of Jean-Michel Jarre, emanating an irresistible scent of sin. “What is this music?” Bob Mack wrote in Spin magazine. “Umberto Eco reading his works on top of a backbeat?” Faithful to their name, Enigma created a space for the mysterious and the forbidden to prosper, eventually securing a game-changing reputation within dance music while at the same time reinventing the new-age genre. The mastermind behind the band was Michael Cretu, a Romanian-German musician whose credits included playing keyboards on Boney M’s Rivers of Babylon, co-producing Mike Oldfield’s Islands and crafting instant hits such as Maria Magdalena for his then wife, the German synthpop star Sandra. It was after experimenting with Gregorian chants on Sandra’s version of Everlasting Love that Cretu decided to explore 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 result was MCMXC a.D., a 40-minute work as intense 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 didn’t hurt, either. The backwards chanting and lyrical references to the Marquis de Sade were blasphemous enough for the Vatican to ban the single Sadeness (Part I) from the radio stations it controlled, a move that must have pleased both the label and Cretu himself; after all, you can’t buy publicity like that. MCMXC a.D. propelled a revolution within the new-age niche, which until then had been mostly ploughing the prog terrain. As DJs carried the gospel forward, the album became an indisputable pioneer of the genre’s crossover to 90s rave and Eurodance culture, with Ace of Base’s 1992 breakthrough Happy Nation being a prime example. Enigma’s legacy also endures: in 2016 their eighth album, The Fall of a Rebel Angel, entered Billboard’s Dance/Electronica chart at No 1 – the same year Chance the Rapper sampled Enigma in his demo of Kanye West’s Waves. Doubts on whether MCMXC a.D. was mere beginner’s luck soon dissipated when Enigma followed it up with the inescapable Return to Innocence, replacing the Gregorian chants with buoyant rhythms and numerology-based lyrics. “[These are] songs for meditation or copulation, whichever one you prefer,” journalist Staci Bonner wrote. The magic of Enigma lies exactly in inciting the two simultaneously.