I've been a fan of Enigma since they arrived on the scene thirty four (!) years ago. As I've written before, one of my most profound memories of Engima was their debut disc playing in my headphones as I took the 24 Divisadero Bus to The Lion's Pub on rainy San Francisco night a little over a month after the passing of my first partner in 1991.
Screen Before the Mirror, probably my favorite Enigma release, gives the astronomer geek in me chills from the very first track with the emotionless, disembodied female voice quietly reading off the astrometric statistics of Mars and those chills continue through the remainder of the album.
When I set out to rebuild my CD collection two years ago I really didn't have a roadmap set out of what to replace. My inventory of what I'd owned was catastrophically out of date, and while it had all been ripped to iTunes, discerning which of those 2200 albums in there had come from my original CD collection, were ripped from vinyl, or had been aquired from "other sources" was impossible to sort out.
My original inventory was a good jumping off point, but as I've learned over the past twenty four months or so, there are a lot of discs that I didn't realize were missing until I saw them on Amazon, eBay, or Discogs…or just out in the wild. So that's where this latest haul comes from. With the exception of Sympathique and Bare, none of these were in my records, but I knew I'd owned them all at some point.
