John O'Neill

Pre-Order: Cassette Ships 21 November. DL issued immediately upon order

JOHN O'NEILL - Optical Soundtracks Vol I (2016 - 2024)

Scores assembled from PDFs and scans of the following texts: Living With Textiles by Elaine Louie, My Cocaine Museum by Michael Taussig, In The Blink Of An Ear by Seth Kim-Cohen, “The Stars Are Beautiful” by Stan Brakhage, “List of compositions by Morton Feldman” (Wikipedia); Photographs of: Josh & Jing’s Koreatown ceiling, New Years Eve 2016; campfire through a tent wall, Emerald Lake, 2017; window screen, Fountain & Poinsettia apartment, 2016; & misc.

Scores performed by AEO-Light (developed by the University of South Carolina in close cooperation with Tommy Aschenbach; the project is made possible by the generous support of the National Endowment for the Humanities)

Piano interpretations transcribed and performed by MuseScore3 (developed by Werner Schweer)

Many thanks to Neil “Cloaca” Young, Ryan Martin, Steve Kado, Josh Lim, Jing Niu, Celina Chapin, Emily May, Hannah Johnson, UCLA GSEIS Lab for [programming / funding without their knowledge / providing technical support / appearing in or just out of frame of] these compositions

'Optical Soundtracks are pieces of playful mistranslation, interrogations of “machine authorship” before the widespread use of “AI,” a computer process for extracting suspect meanings from meaningful objects and spurious meanings from meaningless ones. Personal photographs, PDFs of texts, detail scans of subtractive color prints are assembled into “scores” and fed to AEO-Light, an open-source archival software designed to translate optical soundtracks on film print scans into usable sync-sound wav files. These sequences of images are encoded (in their textures and contrast values, according to AEO-Light) with clicks and hums and idiot melodies that writhe and yowl against their arbitrariness. The scores are available as video files by writing to [email protected]

John O’Neill is a member of the radically horizontal conversational free improv street gang social club the Los Angeles Woodwind Skill Share (LAWWSS) and archives director at Neil Young Archives. ''

A Side

142 Photographs of the Campfire by Emerald Lake, CA • 147 Photographs Facing Northwest • Complete Works of Morton Feldman • Ink Tracing of a Sonogram • In the Blink of an Ear • Living With Textiles 1 • Living With Textiles 2 • Living With Textiles 3 • Living With Textiles 4 • Living With Textiles 5 • Living With Textiles 6 • Roof Access (Koreatown) • My Cocaine Museum, I

B Side

My Cocaine Museum, II • Three Gradient Squares