Daryl: You have also spoken of playing with symmetries in your work, of constructing and forming them within your musical material as if they were a deliberate trigger to your musical imagination in order to defeat and confuse those very same symmetries with quite opposite musical ideas and material. Consequently I have the impression that DARK MATTER is rich in its structural aspects yet at the same time highly reluctant to announce a defined narrative. How do these creative ambitions, for you, play themselves out in DARK MATTER and why?

Richard: Sometimes I think it's the symmetries which are playing with me! It's a very hard concept to try to express, but there is something we find attractive and fascinating about phenomena which are just at the cusp of symmetry and randomness. Almost any «immortal melody», for example, can be analysed in terms of building and breaking patterns. Almost all musical sounds have both regular and irregular features in their waveforms. But this quality I'm talking about isn't really just a cusp or a combination of other things, and can't be analysed out, or grasped in any way through a reductionist attitude. Maybe this is one of the areas where artists are doing some significant «research», even if they aren't aware of it. Anyway, part of the interest in making and breaking symmetries in DARK MATTER is in trying to see how they work to create a poetic/structural reality. I think this is important to Per Inge as well; for example he will often use precision-made elements together with bits of broken glass in the same work.

The overall form of DARK MATTER does have a narrative cohesion, I think. There is for example a very obvious alternation between ensemble music and a series of soloistic episodes for electric guitar. These form a separate composition entitled transmission. (The various components of DARK MATTER can be performed as separate concert items, and at the same time the whole work is conceived so that further components may in the future be added around those which exist now.) The electric guitar in DARK MATTER is as it were a receiver and transmitter (or translator) of information. Each of its six episodes engages with and tries to make sense of the same block of musical material, as if there is some meaning to be extracted from it, treating it as a «message» of some sort, although in fact it ends up (seeming?) not to be. In the last episode, which in this version concludes DARK MATTER, this material finally appears in its original form from the computer, as six superimposed guitar parts which create a chaotic and meaningless tangle of notes, against which the live guitar struggles aggressively but is ultimately defeated, first in its attempt to make sense of things and finally in its attempt to make any sound at all, as its amplification is withdrawn, turning it from the loudest instrument in the ensemble to the quietest.