Interview

An interview between Daryl BUCKLEY of ELISION Ensemble and composer Richard BARRETT

Daryl: How would you characterise DARK MATTER? What kind of work is it and what is it about?

Richard: This is bound to be the first question anyone asks, and at the same time it's the hardest to answer. DARK MATTER is situated «between» many of the forms one expects music to have; at the same time it's situated between the practices of visual and musical art. There is no genre-buzzword which describes it, and I would prefer to avoid inventing yet another one. Trying to break clear of categorisation is one of the things it's about.

But there is more to it than that, of course. It started life as a response to the current state of scientific knowledge and speculation about the nature of the universe, about the nature of human consciousness, and the possible intimate connections between the two, comparably to the way in which much of the Western music of the past was a response to the dogmas and superstition of religion. In saying that, though, I'm certainly not intending to draw a parallel between religious and scientific views. In particular, DARK MATTER emerges from speculation rather than revelation, questions rather than answers. There is no consolatory message in science, no «belief». Nevertheless there are still irreducible mysteries at its heart, which to me are all the more mysterious and beautiful in being the unavoidable residua of rigorous investigations. This is where DARK MATTER began. Where it has ended up is something else; now it's up to the audience to discover what they may.

In astrophysics, «dark matter» is a substance we can't detect, but whose presence can be inferred by the gravitational effect it has on «ordinary» matter, for example in the way galaxies rotate and hold together, which implies that there is a great deal more dark matter than any other kind. For me the title signifies that which always remains «beyond our ken», whether in astronomy or any other field. For religious people, the answers to our questions about the world are written somewhere in a book of «revealed knowledge»; from a scientific point of view that book is the world itself, and the task is to find ways to read it, if indeed it's written in any language we can ever understand. Does the universe behave according to describable «laws», or are those laws «all in the mind»? and since our minds are part of the universe too, what does it mean for something to be «all in the mind»?

I still haven't said what DARK MATTER is «about», I realise; but maybe I've said something about why.