John O’Brien is an Adjunct Professor at the Metro State University, St. Paul.
He has studied with trumpeter Bill Dixon, and established the John O’Brien Ensemble in Minneapolis.

About the Life At Night project he says:

It's probably no coincidence that this peculiar project saw day of light in Minnesota, and that the project in part is subsidized by the American Composers Forum (through the McKnight Composer Fellowship Program). I recall other issues, usually issued in the Innova label, which in part or fully are financed by the American Composers Forum, which thereby confirms its position as one of the most important cultural organizations in the U.S.A. The character of the works channeled through the American Composers Forum, whether released on Innova or elsewhere, is very original, often with a theatrical or narrative core. It’s easy notice this when checking out the releases, like works by Erik Belgum (Blodder) and Fred Ho (Once Upon A Time In Chinese America), to mention but a few.
It’s hard to see how these true niche productions could otherwise have reached such a wide audience worldwide – and these peculiar works of impossible-to-brand cross-idioms constitute an important addition to contemporary art, making sure that the independence and freedom of contemporary art is maintained.

On the Life At Night Internet page you can read:

That is a good way into the piece, which unfolds as we go along, through intriguing but easy listening, somewheres in between the posture you'd occupy while hearing a radio play and the whiskey sipping pleasure you'd allow yourself in a relaxed hour of jazzy textsound or soundscape noblesse!

The tinkling and sub sound beginnings of this work sort of places you in a spacious cityscape, above which seagulls soar and clouds move speedily by, making you dizzy as you look up along the skyscrapers, which play an illusionary trick on you with the help of the clouds, making you feel that the high-rises are moving or falling. You look down again along the perspective reality of everyday city geometry, and everything is in place again.

As the narrative begins you soar with it, on a jazzman’s blue notes in a soundscape of the city, not even lacking distant fire trucks and passing children. There is a melancholy property to this, buses breaking, dogs barking – a man lacking a job…
The narrative comes across naturally as one man’s thoughts as he treads the sidewalk on his hunt for sustenance and reason.

The man recalls:

As this is observation is made, as this is narrated, and in the long pauses between utterances, a distant thunder is perceived, the children’s voices echo between the high-rises, back and forth across the street, as they disappear behind cars down the way, totally occupied inside their own lively conversation, and the blue notes takes on a character of relaxed, introspective chamber music… and you can almost breathe the muggy air of this sound web; it is very illusionary; you invent the street scene yourself while listening, adding a guy at a fruit stand outside his grocery store, some newspaper stands, garbage cans, Fritz the Cat, Batman, Orson Welles, colors, smells, the bumping into passers-by, your own tired feet! John O’Brien has managed to paint a scenery of imagination inside our minds as we listen; a true sign of head-on intuition set to work. He achieves instant recognition in the listener, and can easily pour his narrative story into this environment inside our minds.

Some sections are accompanied, or shrouded in, a staccato string quartet feeling, as if Bartok was around, but tires swish through wet downtown streets, and somewhere a couple makes love while somebody else is involved in arson. (Only half of this is actually imprinted on the disc, while the rest is suggested in my imagination, by the strong atmospheres in the recording).
The narration keeps up, in a rambling chain of thoughts, much in the style of Derek Jarman's Blue (one of the best recordings available in this idiom; CDSTUMM 49), and suddenly I realize how true O’Brien’s earlier statement is, that “the narrator is in fact a musician, a vocalist in the auditory sense field”. John Fuhr plays his narration like a jazz musician, in garlands and prayer beads of rhythmic values, meandering exchanges of morphemes slithering down sidewalks, up staircases, down staircases, over rooftops, in and out of offices, through flocks of newspaper pages on the loose in the breezy gutters.

There’s so much soul in this song of Man, song of City, that the listener feels like he’s under a spell of sorts.

I also extend my gratitude to the guys, whoever they are, who handled the field recordings and the mix-downs, because the sound of the end result is nothing short of brilliant. This is true Cinéma pour l’oreille! Keep on keeping on!