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REVIEW
MUSIC REVIEW // THE OCTOPUS PROJECT - 'HEXADECAGON'
> KJHK's weekly guide to sonic consumption.
This album originally started as a live set designed to be played at the 2010 SXSW music festival in Austin, Texas. It received such good reviews that The Octopus Project members decided to take their set to the studio and polish the recording into its own new album. Hexadecagon contains no lyrics, but features many layers of synths that create a positive and uplifting mood. Fans of previous Octopus Project albums will be shocked with the clean sound compared to the lo-fi recordings formerly used.
Because of its live music origins, Hexadecagon should be listened to all the way through. It also follows a standard of live entertainment with a hook at the beginning, displaying the artsy and technical beauty in the middle, and getting crazy at the end to leave the audience truly satisfied. The operer "Fuguefat" is one of the liveliest on the album and hits you with a barrage of pianos from the start. The 11 minute long track in the middle named "Circling" takes you on a journey to a wonderful and swirly place with more than 40 synth loops. "Catalog"
is the final track and will slam your headphones with a sound wave large enough to surf from the hills of KU to whichever coast you please. Other tracks on this album that shouldn't be left out are "A Phantasy," which harks back to to their older sound, the very bizarre and fun track "Glass Jungle," and the spacey and dreamlike "Hallucinists."
The Octopus Project has clearly found a new sound that displays their creativity and craftsmanship at its finest and makes you feel good to listen to. It's hard to be angry or stressed about anything after listening to Hexadecagon. Give it a listen and try to contain your smile.
★★★★ | ZACK MARSH
BOOK REVIEW // FREEDOM
> Reading, it's not just for textbooks, you know.
Freedom, by Jonathan Franzen, has become the latest pot of gold for an American public and intellectual class searching for answers about what America is now.
The novel centers on the Bergiusus, a middle-class family living in a gentrified section of St. Paul, Minnesota. Politically liberal Walter mortgages his environmental radicalism for more pragmatic progress on conservation projects. Meanwhile, Walter's wife Patty slowly suffocates under the weight of middle-class pleasantness and secretly seeks out the unreliable affection of Walter's former college roommate and successful musician. Joey, Walter and Patty's teenage son, falls in love with the emotionally needy daughter of the God n' Guns Republicans that live next door.
The first half of the novel spins a web of personal storylines that are devastatingly torn apart in the second half. However, the long exposition doesn't come off as meandering. Rather, Franzent takes the time to develop each character in such depth that each carries
emotional force and complexity throughout.
In the second half, the numerous contradictions, lies and conflicts begin to drag the characters' lives ever-so-slowly into a seeming abyss. The characters have taken their freedom and with it they have built themselves a personal hell. The choices made by the Berglungs force them into increasingly morally-bankrupt choices.
Freedom comes close to being a real American Tragedy. But it is not. There is, ultimately, redemption. Franzen wanted to end the novel tragically. But he couldn't do it.
The key to the character's redemption is freedom, the very thing they used to bring suffering upon themselves. I prefer to think Franzen wrote redemption into his novel at the last minute as an exercise of his freedom; his freedom as the author to wrest back control of the narrative from the fatally-flawed characters he set into motion.
JONATHAN SHORMAN