Black Light [Luz Funesto]

Lyrics:

I was ice and she was fire
We were brought together by desire
I felt the burn inside my heart
I knew where it would end
I didn’t know where it would start

When the stakes are down
Baby what’s it to ya?
When the stakes are down
Baby what’s it to ya?

If you torture me to death
I could never love you less
Coming down I want to die

Lyrics and Music by Dave Ryder and Dan McHugh.
Copyright 2010. All Rights Reserved.

Info regarding the lyrics and recording the music:

Dan and I recorded this album using Adobe Audition 1.5. Typically we would begin by creating a chord progression or riff (usually rhythm guitar, but on at least one occasion piano) to which we would find an appropriate drum beat using a simple acid or loopology drum loop (basically at this point it was little more than a metronome, but it would also usually impart some sort of “feel” that we agreed worked for the song).

Then we would add lyrics and new parts, and more lyrics, laying ideas down quickly and at this point non-linearly – only later would we begin to work on an arrangement. We found that we could very quickly have an enormous number of bits and pieces, each given their own track and saved because in the early stages of a song we weren’t sure what would be kept, and what discarded.

Black Light ended up with over 150 tracks, huge even by our standards.

Eventually though we agreed upon an arrangement, weeded out the crap tracks, combined the keepers into stems, and got it down to a manageable 16 tracks.

The voices at the beginning are recordings of Numbers Stations, which are Ulises’ and Calypso’s method of remaining in contact with their FBI-DEA superiors. The voices reading numbers on this recording, however, are not them, but are the agents working the covert operation that “stings” Ulises prior to his entering the US*.

All of the Numbers Station recordings we used on Odiseo were originally recorded by Simon Mason, who graciously allowed us to use them on this project. Thank you very much Simon!

_{*Ulises Santiago is already secretly a member of Grupo de Operaciones Especiales (Special Operations Group, GOPES), of whom his father was second-in-command prior to being assassinated by a suspected cartel. Because of his father’s assassination, Ulises is extremely motivated to destroy the cartels. Unknown to his superiors or peers, Ulises meets and falls in love with Penelope while undercover in Nogales.}

Why didst thou promise such a beauteous day
And made me travel forth without my cloak,
To let base clouds o’ertake me in my way,
Hiding thy bravery in their rotten smoke?

I did not intend for the title Black Light to reference the florescent effect produced by novelty lights, instead I found the Spanish translation funesto, which can mean black but also means fatal, disastrous, evil, unfortunate, baneful, ill-fated or baleful a more illuminating (if you’ll pardon the pun) metaphor than it’s English counterpart. But Black Light is less unwieldy than, say, Evil, Unfortunate, Baneful, Ill-fated Light.

When I came across this photo the thought occurred that if I manipulated the image by inverting the colors (so as to produce a negative effect) the light streaming down from the clouds would appear to be “black light”. Then darkening the picture overall and blacking out the foreground produced the final chilling effect. One accidental byproduct of the inversion effect was the transformation of the hills on the distant horizon into what appears to be the ocean – very fitting I felt, as so much of Ulises’ story involves the sea.

The photo is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic License.

To view the full size version of Dark Sky (edited) click here.