After Enigma

A Guide to New Age ~ Electronica ~ World Fusion

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About After Enigma

Welcome to After Enigma! I've spent quite a few hours over the past few weeks (as of 10-20-2004) getting this site ready, and I think I have enough content written to warrant exposing it to the world. There are quite a few empty titles at the moment, but I'll be writing adding more content in the weeks to come. Besides, who's ever heard of a website that's finished? Don't be ridiculous...

Not knowing anyone who shares my passion for Enigma-genre music (I'm not quite sure what to call it), I've had to seek it out myself whenever I wanted more. This has involved quite a bit of trial and error. Based on the suspicion that I'm not the only one in this situation, I have created this site. It includes reviews of the music I have found that I think fans of Enigma would like.

I only review albums I've heard (and probably own), and provide my opinions about them. Feel free to disagree, and even feel free to voice your disagreement to me, but don't expect me to change the content of my reviews. If I had copious free time and resources, I would create a forum - as it is, I'm on a limited budget of time and money, I'd rather spend what I have on listening and creating more music.

I've divided this site into three tiers:

Tier 1: The big names - Enigma, Delerium, perhaps Deep Forest.

Tier 2: Groups big enough that their CDs are availabe at places like Borders and Amazon, but that you might not know to look for. If you managed to find your way to this obscure site, this is probably what you're looking for.

Tier 3: In case I hadn't made it obvious, I'm an aspiring New Age musician myself ;) This tier is for people like myself who just haven't made (and probably never will). If you've exhausted the commercial market, and still want more, or just want to find music people want to give away, this is where to look.

There are two components to the reviews on this site - a numerical scale and a traditional prose review. I put far more effort into the prose reviews, so pay more attention to those. I include the numerical scale because it is easy to read at a glance, and offers somewhat different information than the prose. It consists of three components, each with a rating between 1 and 5:

New Age: atmospheric synthesizers, uplifiting moods and lyrics, orchestral/classical sounds including chant and opera.

Electronica: beats, grooves, and bleeps. Electronica within the context of the music on this site, not necessarily representative of electronica at large.

World: Non-electronic sounds you don't normally hear in the popular music world - usually from other cultures, but chant and opera might slightly influence this rating as well.

The higher a component's rating, the more I think fans of that component will like it. The scale isn't entirely consistent from one band/group/artist to the next. For example, I might give my own music a New Age rating of 4, and give Enigma's Cross of Changes the same rating. This doesn't mean I think I'm as good as Enigma - I don't - its just a way of demonstrating which way the music leans. That said, if I think an album is awful, I'll probably give it a fairly low rating accross the board. I try to be fairly consistent within an artist, though.