Elision, Cicada Ensemble, Christian Eggen - Richard Barrett: Dark Matter (2012) CD-Rip

Dark Matter (completed in 2003) is a large-scale composition for voices, ensemble and electronics that features great contrasts of color, of different kinds of polyphony, of serenity versus violent music bordering on chaos, of slowly evolving music versus fast sound snippets. The form of the work is rather open and does not fall into a particular category. Apart from a common theme and the connecting element of Transmissions, recurring interludes between the sections that are dominated by a hybrid instrument of electric and acoustic guitar, the music is bound together precisely by the overarching element of wide-reaching explorations of ever new territory of musical texture and color. The music is mostly dense and complex, with exciting and often dazzling polyphony. Dark Matter refers to the much larger portion of invisible (non-radiating) matter over visible matter in the universe, inferred by, e.g., the way galaxies rotate and hold together, yet in this work it also stands more generally for "that which is unknown, and possibly unknowable" (Barrett).