Octavarium

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For the Roman Catholic liturgical sense of the word, see Octavarium Romanum.
For the track of the same name, see Octavarium (song).
Octavarium
Octavarium cover
Cover art by Hugh Syme
Studio album by Dream Theater
Released June 7, 2005
Recorded November 2004 - February 25, 2005 at The Hit Factory in New York City
Genre Progressive metal
Length 75:45
Label Atlantic Records
Producer John Petrucci and Mike Portnoy
Professional reviews
Dream Theater chronology
Live at Budokan
(2004)		 Octavarium
(2005)		 Score
(2006)

Octavarium is the eighth full-length Dream Theater studio album, released on June 7, 2005 (see 2005 in music).

It holds the distinction of being the last album ever recorded at The Hit Factory in New York City. According to the DVD Documentary in Score, John Petrucci considers this album to be their best work.

Contents

[edit] Songs

Octavarium follows a pattern started in Dream Theater's 6th studio album, Six Degrees of Inner Turbulence, which had 6 songs and the word six in the title. The next album, Train of Thought, contained 7 tracks and was their 7th studio album. Octavarium, the 8th studio album by the band, follows both of these apparent "trends" with 8 songs and a title related to the number eight, as already mentioned. The pattern continues in a different form in their 9th studio album, Systematic Chaos, which has only 8 tracks, but the first track lasts exactly 9 minutes.

Every song of the album is in a different minor key, starting with F, then G, A, B, C, D, E, and returning to F. This is evident by the treble clef staves in the liner notes. Also, between some pairs of songs, a transition, represented in the CD as negative time preceding the second song of the pair, is made in the corresponding accidental key related to the pair in question. For instance, the synth solo following Panic Attack (in the key of C minor) is placed as negative time preceding Never Enough (in the key of D minor) and is in the key of C# minor.

[edit] Golden Ratio

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Many fans have made observations about recurring references to the golden ratio, in particular the number of 5s and 8s in the album art. The golden ratio is very common in art throughout history and in Nature itself. The name Octavarium itself has 5 syllables, while connotating 8. The use of 5s and 8s stems from the number of natural notes (white keys on a piano) and black keys (sharp/flat notes) in an octave. It may also refer to the number of members in the band from its inception in 1985 to 2005, Octavarium being the band's 8th studio album, and the subsequent "Score" being their fifth live album.

Several of the 5 and 8 references in the album are:

  1. This is their 8th album and they have released 5 live DVDs.
  2. The cover and back cover of the inlay show a Newton's Cradle with eight pendulums, and five birds in between them, arranged in the same pattern as black piano keys. (The black birds represent flats and sharps and the balls of the pendulum represent the natural notes.)
  3. On the back of the album there are piano keys in an octave.
  4. On the page 5 of the booklet, there are two dominoes summing up to 5 and 8.
  5. On the page 7 of the booklet, there is a spider (which has eight legs) trapped inside an octagon-shaped maze. The maze is made of five layers and has eight doorways amongst the layers, and eight walls that form "dead ends".
  6. On the page 11 of the booklet, there is an octopus (which has eight legs), five fish and an octagonal stop sign.
  7. On the page 13 of the booklet, there is a plan in which a five-pointed star was drawn inside an octagon. The scale of the plan is stated to be 5:8.
  8. On the insides of the the front and back covers of the booklet, there are two pictures of the same boy holding two ends of a can telephone. First picture is accompanied by 8 lines of capitalized text (track titles). Second picture is accompanied by 5 lines (band members' names).
  9. The boy has 5 fingers showing in one picture, and the other picture only has 3 fingers showing. This adds up to eight.
  10. The booklet itself has eight pages, if left and right pages are considered to be a single page.
  11. On the inlay of the album, there is a billiards eight-ball.
  12. The title track (Octavarium) comprises five movements and is the eighth track on the album.
  13. On the actual cd, there is a star inside of an octagon, much like as described on page 13. Also, the star in the octagon has musical keys written around it that go in a circle of fifths.
  14. The song "Panic Attack" - Track 5 - lasts 8:13; 5, 8, and 13 are all consecutive numbers in the Fibonacci sequence, which uses the Golden Ratio.
  15. Octavarium, The title track, is 24 minutes long. 8 goes into 24 three times. Add this to the number of movements (5) to get 8 again.
  16. In the booklet, the time signature shown in "Panic Attack" is 5/8 time.
  17. The word "Octavarium" is 5 syllables long.
  18. The Newton's Cradle on the cover and the musical hooks connecting all the songs together lyrically and melodically have also given rise to the theory that the entire album is intended to be a concept album portraying continuity.
  19. The cover and back cover of the inlay has five birds and on page 5 there are three birds. This also adds up to eight.
  20. The album features 8 songs, but if you beak down "Octavarium" into its 5 movements and "The Root Of All Evil" into its 2 parts, you get 13 (8 in the first seven songs + 5 in "Octavarium")
  21. There are 8 notes in a scale before you reach the next octave, starting with the Root [of all Evil].
  22. If you listen to the end of Octavarium, you hear the same sound that's in the very beginning of The Root of All Evil. This symbolizes the final note moving on to the next root note, and starting a new octave.

Also, it is worth of mention that the golden ratio references has an antecedent in the album Six Degrees Of Inner Turbulence, where the first CD has 5 songs, and the second one contains the entire title-track, splitted in 8 movements.

[edit] Track listing

  1. "The Root of All Evil" – 8:25 (music by Dream Theater, lyrics by Portnoy)
    • VI. Ready
    • VII. Remove
  2. "The Answer Lies Within" – 5:33 (Dream Theater, Petrucci)
  3. "These Walls" – 7:36 (Dream Theater, Petrucci)
  4. "I Walk Beside You" – 4:29 (Dream Theater, Petrucci)
  5. "Panic Attack" – 8:13 (Dream Theater, Petrucci)
  6. "Never Enough" – 6:46 (Dream Theater, Portnoy)
  7. "Sacrificed Sons" – 10:42 (Dream Theater, LaBrie)
  8. "Octavarium" – 24:00 (Dream Theater, LaBrie/Petrucci/Portnoy)
    • I. Someone Like Him (lyrics by Petrucci)
    • II. Medicate (Awakening) (LaBrie)
    • III. Full Circle (Portnoy)
    • IV. Intervals (Portnoy)
    • V. Razor's Edge (Petrucci)

[edit] Chart performance

[edit] Credits

[edit] Band

[edit] Guests

  • Strings arranged and conducted by Jamshied Sharifi
  • Jill Dell'Abate - Orchestral Contractor
  • String Quartet on The Answer Lies Within
    • Elena Barere - First Violin
    • Carol Webb - Second Violin
    • Vincent Lionti - Viola
    • Richard Locker - Cello

[edit] Speculation on the title

Due to its unusual name, many Dream Theater fans speculated on what they believe to be the meaning of the album's title.[citation needed]

At first the band was going to name the album just Octave. But when prog rock band Spock's Beard released their (also eighth) album Octane earlier in 2005, Dream Theater decided to differentiate its name a bit more from that.

Some thought that the title referred to "Octavarium Romanum", which was a book of Catholic liturgy referring to a period known as the Octave. There is also a similarity to the musical Octave: Root, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th, Octave - and the title of the first track is "The Root of All Evil". Others theorized that the title came from Latin words meaning "Various Eight", since it has eight tracks and the band has said that the eight songs on the record are all of different styles. However, this is incorrect Latin; the Latin word for eight is "octo," not "octa," and "varium" is singular when it would need to be plural. This theory may have come from the fact that Octavarium is the band's eighth album, since "octavus" is Latin for "eighth".

Yet another interpretation was that the "-arium" suffix is used to denote a place where something is held, in this case musical octaves. This turns out to be the closest to the truth, when the lyrics from the title track ("Trapped inside this Octavarium") are considered, creating a portmanteau from the words octave and -arium.

[edit] Pre-release leaking

For approximately three months prior to Octavarium's release, James LaBrie's solo album Elements of Persuasion was distributed as Octavarium in many file-sharing circles[citation needed]. Because LaBrie's voice can be heard on both albums, many people were unable to tell that it was in fact a different band and it continued to be distributed as a genuine Dream Theater release until approximately a week before the official release date of the album. At that time a version of the actual album found its way onto the Internet, but it was slightly different from the final product released to stores; the ending to the track "Octavarium" was slightly modified from a lonely flute playing to the starting piano note[1]. On an XM radio show interview with Eddie Trunk, Portnoy revealed that only approximately ten people were given a copy of that version of the album: the five band members, Portnoy's father Howard Portnoy, and a handful of people at Atlantic Records.[1]

[edit] Panic Attack sound clip

Mike Portnoy provided a sound clip of "Panic Attack" to Gigantour website 4 weeks before the release of "Octavarium".

[edit] References

  1. ^ a b Mike Portnoy.com - Audio

[edit] External links

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