Seven Lives Many Faces

The seven is a magic number present across religions, traditions, and continents for centuries. Released in September 2008, the seventh Enigma album draws on that resonance, marking a new chapter in what was by then an eighteen-year musical journey. “With E7 I decided to land again,” Michael Cretu has said, framing the album as a return after the cosmic flight of A Posteriori. Seven Lives Many Faces is a musical joint venture between classical and modern music: the Vienna Symphonic Orchestra combined with the “dirtiest hip-hop loops”, in Cretu’s own phrasing.

At the album’s centre is a beginning of an exciting musical joint venture between classical and modern music. The title track Seven Lives opens the album as a mesmerising blend of earthy hip-hop beats and orchestral string parts: “Traces, many faces… that’s the start of Seven Lives!” The single La Puerta Del Cielo is a hypnotic blend of traditional vocal chants and a haunting melody. Its powerful voice, sung in the dialect of Ibiza by a sixty-year-old singer, introduces a disappearing folkloric tradition from the island Cretu calls home.