15 Years After

Infobox Album
Name = 15 Years After
Type = Box set
Artist = Enigma


Released = December 9, 2005
Recorded = A.R.T. Studios, Ibiza from 1990–2005
Genre = New Age, Ambient
Length = mm:ss
Label = Virgin Schallplatten GmbH
Producer = Michael Cretu
Reviews =
Last album = "Voyageur"
(2003)
This album = "15 Years After"
(2005)
Next album = "A Posteriori"
(2006)

"15 Years After" is a box set by the musical project, Enigma and released by Virgin Germany on December 9, 2005. The box set contains 8 discs, 5 of them original studio albums created from 1990 to 2003, 2 DVDs and a bonus CD of Enigma's songs covered by Rollo Armstrong.

As the title suggests, the box set's release was to celebrate the 15 years since the release of Enigma's first single, "Sadeness (Part I)". The album cover was taken from "Lady with an Ermine", a 1485 painting by Leonardo Da Vinci. The box set packaging and photography was done by Dirk Rudolph while artwork direction and original designs were created by Johann Zambryski, a long-time designer of Enigma artworks.

Originally the box set was sold at €128 and this raised a stir within the Enigma forums. Fans criticised Virgin for releasing an expensive box set and capitalising on the fans to earn more money, while others lamented that the discs were not remastered unlike the compilation album "" but were instead fitted with Copy Control. The fact that the new single, "Hello and Welcome" received mixed responses from the fans, and "The Dusted Variations" in turn received lukewarm responses made other fans question the need to splurge out more money for an expensive box set when they already have most if not all of the albums and/or DVDs.

To make things worse, the music video for "Out from the Deep" which was dropped from the "Remember the Future" DVD without an apparent reason, was still absent in this re-release, and despite the box set being 12-inch vinyl-sized, there were little information about the history of the project within the booklet, apart from the credits and a press release inside.

Later on, the price of the box set dropped to €92.99 and on November 30, 2005, the producer and creator of Enigma, Michael Cretu personally visited the EMI factory in Uden, Netherlands to sign a thousand copies of the box set. The thousand signed copies had Cretu's initials {"MC") signed with a silver marker. While signed copies of Enigma's albums are extremely rare, the autographed version of the box set was still available for purchase at "Amazon.de" half a year after its release. Also within the box set was a code which enables owners of the box set to download the music videos of "Voyageur" and "Boum-Boum" by typing it in a special section within Enigma's official website, " [http://enigma.de www.enigma.de] ".

Box set contents

Studio albums
* "MCMXC a.D." (1990)
* "The Cross of Changes" (1993)
* "Le Roi Est Mort, Vive Le Roi!" (1996)
* "The Screen Behind the Mirror" (1999)
* "Voyageur" (2003)

Bonus CD
* "Hello and Welcome" and "The Dusted Variations"

DVDs
* "Remember the Future" (2001)
* "MCMXC a.D.: The Complete Video Album" (2003)

References

* EnigmaMusic.com (2005) [http://www.enigmamusic.com/forum/showthread.php?t=9383 EnigmaMusic.com Pictures of MC Autographing "15 years After"] . Retrieved Dec. 6, 2005.
* Joar Grimstvedt (2006) [http://www.five.no/enigma/records/15YearsAfter.html Enigma: 15 Years After (boxset)] . Retrieved May. 10, 2006.