Life at Night by John O'Brien

Posted Sat Mar 17 12:47:53 2001 by mpxreview

In Understanding Media, Marshall McLuhan wrote, "all media are active metaphors in their power to translate experience into new forms." This is precisely what John O'Brien has affirmed with his stunning CD release Life at Night.

From the old RCAR-28 in the living room to your Compaq H3650 PDA on the A-train, radio -- and its corollary streaming audio -- continues to be a deeply important element in our lives. From the time the Mercury Theatre upped the ante with radio play productions based on medium-appropriate dramatic scripts, innovative use of sound-effects and music (by CBS staff composer/conductor Bernard Herrmann - by the by), the way was paved for every human being within earshot of a radio receiver to experience the art of drama in a manner requiring an active commitment by entering a listening zone that extends internally into their imagination for a second staging of the play -- if you will.

We see a direct line from The Mercury to Life at Night - which has all the same components: the musical score, the sound effects, as well as the appropriate use
of text that creates a seamless listening environment. Of course, in the years between The Mercury and Life At Night hundreds of other innovative radio dramatists have made their own extraordinary impact on the medium. One comes particularly to mind -- the late, great Jean Shepherd -- who McLuhan regarded as the "first to use radio as an essay and novel form for recording our common awareness of a totally new world of universal human participation in all human events, private or collective."

O'Brien has advanced the form. To our ears, Life At Night seems like a synthesis of the arts of Shep and Welles. The result is what O'Brien intends: an alteration of the scale of a radio play to fit the medium of the Internet. O'Brien says that this scaling down "is roughly similar to that of a comic book to a novel -- highly condensed text supported by a secondary medium that conveys elements that the text does not directly address, i.e., atmosphere, environment, physical space and depth, emotional information."

O'Brien accomplishes this through his evocative script (articulated with John Fuhr's dispassionate narration, reminiscent of Joe Frank) and an audio engineer's ear for high-qual sound of all things ordinary. There is no doubt that as you listen, you are firmly on set.

The entire misenscene is infused with the soul of urban Chicago jazz by the soundtrack O'Brien scored and conducted. This beautiful score can stand on its own legs as an impeccable mirror of the narrative. And it reflects the expertise not only of the composer, but the band of extraordinary musicians O'Brien assembled for the project: Peter Linman, Casey O'Brien, Graham O'Brien, Erich Hofmeister, Scott Newel and John Choi.

And when you link to O'Brien's Complete Theatrical Sound site you can even find a virtual set, based on a painting by Jocelyn Bullock, that has been deconstructed into animated .gifs and random typography that may or may not yield a word. If you are short on time, O'Brien has given us his equivalent of the sound bite - condensing the entire CD into three scenes - indeed very much like a storyboard, or a comic book -- narrative distilled to its absolute essentialness.

Scene One: When I woke up, I was scared. I was coming out of some very deep place ... But what was I afraid of? What would I be afraid of?

Scene Two: Artie had said without being asked, 'some guys knew things automatically, others could learn.' I wondered which category I was in. I wondered which category Artie thought I was in.

Scene Three: There on my desk is a slip ordering me down the hall. Everybody watches me straighten up. I began walking down the long corridor and finally through the thick glass doors. Life at Night is the work of professionals of the highest order. This comes as no surprise. In the 70s, O'Brien studied and played in and around NY with trumpeter Bill Dixon. Moving back to Michigan, he established the John O'Brien Ensemble and became an Adjunct Professor at Metropolitan State University. He was also Composer-in-Residence, at Random Chamber Theater in Saint Paul, and was awarded a grant for Jazz/Folk/Ethnic Composition from the National Endowment for the Arts.

O'Brien wrote us a long e-mail that we found fascinating because it describes his enthusiasm for the medium as an artist, and because it is a manifesto about the place art has on the net.

In part, O'Brien wrote:
 

"Life at Night does have a realm off the net too. The original idea was to create an audio product that would blend in equal parts text (story telling) with original music ("free jazz"/electronics) with the noise of the city treated as music. The challenge was to maintain this tension between the elements and with rigor! The comic book does the same thing. It condenses all of Robinson Crusoe into a 30-minute high sensuality experience by limiting the text and relying upon support media to "fill in" or to provoke some interpretation by the audience."

In the end, Life at Night humbly tries to address the big questions about life and meaning and work and loneliness. The net aspect is only our attempt to present the content in some appropriate and engaging way."

The presentation had to evoke the quality that the music and text were aiming at, namely: old guys, laid off- forgotten old working guys, who are way down at the end of any "victim" lists and who are forgotten nevertheless. These are guys I'd encountered for years as a recruiter, and I was haunted by the whole picture: working one day -- gone the next. And who cares? And all because of technology?

From flat out on the floor, Life at Night is the story of the slow process of healing as our hero discovers the humility and power inherent in his own humanity, and in the humanity -- that he only now has time to observe, internalize and celebrate.

It is March, 2001. In the wake of the dot-com crash we are hearing stories of thousands of 20 to 40 someones, who are trying to salvage themselves after years of working 20 hour days building high burn rate Towers of Babel. Now downsized, outsourced, burnt out, maxed out, without savings, often moving back home with parents, moving to another state, taking jobs in convenience stores, trying to figure out how to pay taxes on their stock option ricochets, everone is paying the price for the venture capitalists' follies. Life at Night reflects what is happening in the real world to the guy next door, your cousin Sue in Silicon Valley, maybe even yourself.
 

"When we started on the net portion of Life at Night, we wanted to present something that provided "net based content"- something that could only occur on the net- something made for the net. It seemed to me that the "content isle" of the internet was vastly under stocked and the trouble with the virtual is that it is usually just watered reality. In this sense, nothing virtual compares to the real deal. But,that in its infinitesimally small way Life at Night has tried to do something that is inherently net based and that addresses in a new production some of the meaning based stuff. Like --"what the hell is going on here?" Like- "what happens when you- an adult- think of life outside the context of work and careers?