The Negative of Silence

Dear Seung-min,

I don’t even know how to start this without sounding like a drunk poet—
but you just rewrote the laws of silence.

When I first dragged you down those stairs, three floors below the metro, I thought maybe you’d laugh. Or scold me. Or mark decibels on your little clipboard and tell me: “Tae-jin, this place leaks like a sieve.”

But no.
Instead you brought that machine.
That impossible contraption of yours: wires like veins, copper plates pressed against concrete, tiny microphones listening for ghosts. You fed the walls with a low hum—barely audible—and suddenly the whole room shifted.

The drip of water? Gone.
The echo of my own footsteps? Swallowed.
You told me the trick: “Active phase-cancellation, mapped in three dimensions.” But to me it felt like sorcery. You built a negative of the room and folded it back into itself, until silence wasn’t just absence, but a presence—thick, protective, absolute.

Now we can scream here.
We can tune the amps to eleven, let the strings howl, and from the outside? Nothing. Just concrete and the steady heartbeat of the city above.

So thank you, Seung-min.
For turning an abandoned basement into a sanctuary.
For making sure our noise can live, even when the world demands quiet.

Next time, bring your guitar.
I swear: the first riff will belong to you.

Forever loud,
Tae-jin