Anggun

Born in Jakarta, Anggun absorbed both indigenous Javanese sounds and the rock legacy of Elvis Presley before relocating from Indonesia to Europe in pursuit of Western chart success. She took her first stage at age seven and cut her debut album two years afterward. By seventeen she ranked as Indonesia’s dominant commercial force in the early 1990s. Seeking wider horizons, she settled first in London and then in Paris, where producer Erick Benzi—whose résumé already encompassed Celine Dion, Jean-Jacques Goldman, and Johnny Hallyday—helmed her 1998 Epic debut, Snow on the Sahara.

That set merged the ethno-dance textures then associated with Deep Forest and the adult-contemporary introspection exemplified by Julia Fordham. Although the album achieved only modest global traction, its title track became her signature international breakthrough, reaching the summit in Italy, peaking at number 22 on the Billboard Hot 100, and registering on charts in eight territories altogether. French- and Indonesian-language counterparts, titled Au Nom de la Lune and Anggun respectively, appeared simultaneously, a bilingual strategy repeated on every later project.

Chrysalis (issued in France as Désirs Contraires) followed in 2000, granting her greater songwriting authority and steering the sound toward electro-pop. Two years later she supplied the score for the Danish Dogme feature Elsker Dig for Evigt, also known as Open Hearts, marking her final American release of the period. For 2005’s Luminescence she bypassed Benzi, assembling instead an array of producers, and moved to the Universal subsidiary Heben Music. The album climbed to number 16 in France—her strongest showing there—and yielded the single “Saviour,” alternately titled “Cesse la Pluie,” her second-most successful worldwide release; the track also featured on the soundtrack of Transporter 2, which topped the U.S. box office.

Elevation arrived in 2008. Her fifth international outing, Echoes, appeared in 2011 on Warner—the first time an English-language edition of her work entered the French chart.