It's a diverse piece of art with everything from 80s heavy metal-influences to death metal to progressive music, all you need from metal packed into one album. And you will definetly recognize the band because we have kept the key ingredients of the Scar Symmetry-sound from the two first albums on "Holographic Universe", but with this one we also break new ground in terms of being both catchy and progressive!

About two months, we started early in December 2007 and finished it up in early February 2008.

Per created the riffs and music for some songs and Jonas created the riffs and music for some songs. They usually split the material approx. 40/60 since Jonas tends to write a couple of more songs than Per for every album. Then Christian came up with vocal lines for all the songs and after that I write the lyrics for the songs and try to fit a certain concept into the vocal lines that I get. That's pretty much how we've worked since day one and it works incredibly well for us.

Well, the concept behind the album-title is pretty complicated but it deals with the connection between quantum physics and Eastern philosophy. The basic message is that new science is coming to the same conclusions that philosophers discovered thousands of years ago, there is no matter as such- there is only energy! The story-line is sort of a continuation of the theme from "Pitch black progress" too, because on the previous album the population of the world were enslaved by a world government who monitored our thoughts and actions. On "Holographic Universe" the earth's population has realized that we don't have to buy into the world government's agenda, we can choose to think and do whatever we want. And all that we see vividly in our minds has the potential to manifest, whatever it is that we choose to visualize.

I actually like all the songs but for example "Timewave Zero" speaks to me in a special way because it has a very emotionally moving sound to it. "Morphogenesis", "Quantumleaper" and "Ghost Prototype I: Measurement of Thought" are all great and the title-track "Holographic Universe" is also incredible because its so...out there. But as I said, it's hard to choose fave-songs. It varies a lot as time goes by aswell.

Our musical evolution is an on-going thing, I think we grow as a band with every album. One thing that helped us evolve a lot was all the touring we did in support of "Pitch black progress", because we had never played that much live when we recorded the first two albums. So when we entered the studio this time we were much more secure as a band and that helped a lot in the recording process, I think that you can hear that self-confidence when you listen to the new album. And the production is a little bit different this time, "holographic universe" has a more organic, warm sound to it while the previous album was more mechanical and cold-sounding. That coldness fit the concept on "Pitch black progress" but the production on "Holographic universe" fits the new lyrical concept better, I think. And we've tried a lot of new stuff on "Holographic universe", like new ways of singing, more progressive explorations and an overall catchier feel to the material.

We haven't decided what songs we'll play live yet, we'll try pretty much all of them and go with the ones that we feel are most suitable for the live performances. But "Morphogenesis" is one song that we'll definetly play since we're going to record a video for that song really soon.

Yeah, "Morphogenesis" will be the video-song this time. We'll record it in the beginning of June in Helsinki, Finland, and it'll be available around the release of the album.

I don't know what to tell you, they are all great! Per wrote the music for "Ghost prototype 1: measurement of thought", "Trapezoid", "Holographic Universe" and "Ghost prototype 2: Deus ex machina" and Jonas wrote the music for the rest of the songs. We excluded one of the songs that Jonas wrote because the album became too long, we recorded 13 songs and used 12 of them. Jonas has been writing on and off since "pitch plack..." was released so he had a BUNCH of songs while Per wrote his songs right before the recording. Normally we write everything two weeks before the recording but it's been two years since we recorded the previous album and Jonas couldn't hold his creativity back for that long, I suppose.

I'm not sure what you mean with this question. The anecdotes are endless, but something that "marked" the band. Hmmm, that could mean anything. The first trip to US in 2007 was pretty spectacular, that whole thing was like a giant anecdote, he he. I had never been there before and getting the opportunity to go there and play music was truly a dream come true. That's why we returned half a year later! Anyway, the US is like a different planet as far as culture goes and it was a memory for a lifetime to spend a couple of months there in 2007. Simply fantastic.