Connor MacLeod Enigma: Gregorian Chants, Electronic Beats & Hidden Mysteries (Secret Sounds) lit

A hit single sung in Latin. A producer nobody could name. A rumour, spreading across a dozen countries, that the record was the work of an occult order.

Enigma's MCMXC a.D. is one of the strangest objects ever to sell ten million copies, and for thirty five years almost everything the public knew about it has been guesswork. This book replaces the guesswork with evidence.

Working from court records, sleeve credits, contemporary journalism, ethnomusicology, fan archaeology and the forensic listening of engineers who have spent decades analysing these tracks, it answers the questions the album refused to answer.

Who were the monks? They had names, a conductor, a recording date and eventually a lawyer. What are they singing? A processional antiphon and a psalm, translated here in full, containing nothing occult whatsoever. Where did the sound come from? From a London soundsystem groove, a Greek progressive rock apocalypse, a heavy metal thunderstorm, an opera singer, a factory flute sample and a rack of reverb units on a Spanish hillside.

And why did so many people hear something forbidden in it? That answer turns out to be the most interesting of all.

INSIDE THE BOOK
The full story of how Michael Cretu got from a Bucharest conservatoire to an anonymous Balearic studio, by way of Frankfurt session work, Boney M. and a marriage to a Eurodance star.

A complete account of the machines: the hard disk workstation that replaced tape, the samplers, the drum machines and the artificial reverberation that turned a small parish room into a cathedral that never existed.

A chapter on Gregorian chant as a thousand year old attention technology, and on exactly what happens to it when a drum machine is placed underneath.

The Satanism panic examined honestly: what was actually alleged, why the accusation was wrong, and why, given the evidence available in 1991, it was not unreasonable.

The four great fan theories, including the secret order, the buried messages and the numerology, weighed one at a time against the record.

The Marquis de Sade, and why a man who could not stop arguing with God is the correct patron for this album.

A sample by sample archaeology of both records, including the Aphrodite's Child material that almost nobody talks about and the space mission transmissions hiding inside the second album.

Two lawsuits told in full: the Bavarian choir who heard themselves on the radio, and the Amis elder from Taiwan whose voice carried an Olympic Games while his name was left off the sleeve.

A complete discography and an appendix ledger of every identified sample, graded by strength of evidence.

WHO IT IS FOR
Anyone who ever owned a copy of the red album. Anyone who has wondered what those voices are actually saying. Anyone interested in sampling, in the ethics of taking other people's music, in the brief window when the entire recorded history of the species was there for the taking, and in how a record made of borrowed fragments can still open something in the chest of a stranger driving on a motorway thirty years later.

The identity of the producer was never the mystery. This book explains what was.