Enigma Cretu was encouraged to pursue a solo project by Oldfield, who was impressed by his studio production skills and musical ideas. This led to the creation of his musical project Enigma, which Cretu said was born from the idea of making music that he himself liked, while bringing in a sense of mysticism. The formation of Enigma involved Fabrice Cuitad, under the alias of David Fairstein, and Frank Peterson. The trio worked together to create their groundbreaking debut single "Sadeness (Part I)", which became a surprise international hit. MCMXC a.D., the album, which was released in 1990, was hugely successful. Cretu was not surprised by the album's unexpected success, as he recalled telling his wife before its release, "This will be a huge hit or nothing at all". "Cretu's style of mixing a variety of musical genres, samples and sounds was very unusual to the ears of the listening public at the time, and led to him being described as an "alchemist in sound". The second album, The Cross of Changes, was released in 1993. Peterson had disagreements with Cretu by the time of recording and left the project in 1991. Cretu changed Enigma's direction from Gregorian chants to tribal chants for its second album, culminating in its second international hit single "Return to Innocence". Cretu purposefully reduced the use of Gregorian chants as numerous artists had started to use them in their music, causing "an avalanche of bad copies", but later regarded it as a compliment. Cretu was approached by Paramount Pictures to write the soundtrack of the film Sliver and he came up with another 1993 single "Carly's Song" after the main female character's name. In 1996 Enigma's third album Le Roi est mort, vive le Roi! was released. Stylistically, it sounded like a combination of the first and second albums. It did not achieve the same level of success as them, but sold over 1 million copies in the United States and received a Gold certificate in the United Kingdom nonetheless. In 1999 Cretu steered the project in another direction by using samples of Carl Orff's Carmina Burana for the fourth album The Screen Behind the Mirror, released in 2000. Andru Donalds and Ruth-Ann Boyle first appeared as features on this Enigma project. Although Jens Gad had been working with Cretu on the earlier albums, this was the first time that he had been given actual