The Price of Innocence

I think I first became interested in the origins of the vocal sample in Return to Innocence sometime in the late 90’s - I was listening to the song Mickey Mars by The Orb and realized it was using the same indigenous-sounding chant as was used in RTI. I didn’t start looking into this in earnest until a few years ago, and was quite surprised by nearly everything I learned.

First off, I truly love Dufang and Igay’s debut album Circle of Life. Each track has a bouncy joy to it, and I highly recommend it to any Enigma fans. You can hear the whole thing here:

Another really wonderful thing I found while researching was my discovery of Andras Salamon’s film Huttyan. It feels like such a miracle that a film like this could exist, covering a specific incident in such intimate detail. Finding the entire film proved to be quite a challenge. One of Huttyan’s children uploaded the first 20 minutes or so to YouTube, but it was years later until I discovered the rest of the film had been uploaded to a Hungarian version of YouTube. Neither copy was complete, but I had the whole film between the two versions. I’ve combined and uploaded them here for anyone that is interested in seeing the whole thing (a small disclaimer: the first 20 minutes is ripped from YouTube, but the remaining 40 is a screen recording - the audio is noticeably worse and I guess I skipped ahead towards the end - apologies!):

I attempted to get in touch with both Huttyan’s family and Andras Salamon in order to find a higher quality, complete version, but had no luck on both fronts. I am still very interested in finding a full cut and having it remastered and translated into English so if you happen to know where I can find a copy please do get in touch!

The final kicker - I recently discovered that The Orb’s Mickey Mars doesn’t use the same song as Return to Innocence - it uses the a different track from the same cassette compilation. You can hear both tracks (and many more wonderful pieces of music) here:

I find the Bunun section to be particularly wonderful.