At the border, Southern troops assemble a speaker. Individual blocks stacked 20 feet high, arranged into a rectangular obelisk with a tangled braid of wiring drooping down its rear. It’s a plan that has been organized by a small group of politicians and military strategists in Seoul—hunched, withered men who look to the horizon in the North with rampant hatred and buried desire. They’ve heard stories of Northern defectors moved to action by South Korean music, by their songs of yearning individuality. Balloons, pamphlets, flash drives—these have been as effective as throwing letters into a polluted ocean. It’s time to try something different, something new. There are months of meetings where these men discuss lining the border with military-grade speakers, built to propel K-pop over the border like catapults of flaming ideology. Men shake hands, clink cufflinks on release. Songs are deconstructed, put back together, organized into a playlist, loaded into the clip.
There are a few higher-ups—older strategists with no taste for contemporary music—who raise concerns that, no matter how many speakers they stack, the sound won’t carry far north enough to reach cities like Pyongyang or Hamhŭng. And after each dissenting opinion, there is a pale hand that shoots into the air, waiting to be called on. This is the physicist—a young, ambitious man brought on as an advisor to the project.
This is true, he tells these strategists. The music will not echo from the DMZ to the border of Manchuria, and this is okay. He explains that sound and music and language do not evaporate after disappearing into silence. He talks of time and space and the complexity of sound—how every word we’ve ever said still dangles in the air around us, suspended in time, crystalized in a glowing microscopic amber. And while these rigid, stern-faced men listen to the physicist’s explanation, they are each silently reminded of a secret belief they’ve harbored from the beginning, that launching their music into the North’s atmosphere will have a more ephemeral, cumulative effect. Each of these men quietly hold within them a childlike image of North Korea as a glass box that they are filling with an invisible pesticide, an airborne pathogen that will lurk in thickets of cloud and fog until it is inhaled by all.
Despite being briefed on what the Southerners were up to, the Northern troops stationed at the Joint Security Area still get a writhing sort of dread in their stomachs watching the loudspeakers arranged across the border. They’ve been made aware that there will be music. They’ve had long meetings on the importance of remaining still and unflinching in the face of these American puppets, these Southern cowards who resort to noise over bullets. Still, though, there’s a nervous anticipation that the soldiers can’t seem to ignore. They feel hyperaware of their posture, staring out at the Southern troops across from them, wondering if today will be the day—if this will be the last shift where sounds of birds and wind and rippling water add color to the air. And on one bright, cloudless morning, the Northern soldiers hear the soft hiss of electricity sizzling over the breeze. Even the Southerners begin to grip their rifles a little tighter, and before the music begins, there are four pregnant seconds where the men on both sides of the 38th parallel are united in nervous, vibrating anticipation.
A switch is flipped on some faraway panel, and for those stationed at the border, it is like standing underneath a rocket at the precise moment of liftoff. Bass shakes the ground, sends birds scattering into the air, their nestlings chirping up towards their retreating parents with wrinkled eyes and shattered eardrums. It is music so terribly loud that an immediate wave of doubt passes over the Southerners. They worry that their superiors have gone too far—that at any moment the Northern troops might raise their rifles, scrape off the wax seal of history, and continue the conflict where they left off. The song itself is fast-paced and bombastic, full of lyrics that are charged with sex and indulgence and palpable self-interest. The soldiers stare at each other across the partition, keeping their faces expressionless while their minds unravel tangles of lyrics and tempos, and whether they like it or not, there is no way to ignore music that drowns out all other noise, and when the soldiers end their shifts and return to their quarters, they can still hear it in the air, in the wind, seeping through their walls and windows. Days turn to weeks and weeks become unending. Men from both sides wake up tapping their feet, humming along. They try headphones and ear plugs and find that the music has followed them into the silent privacy of their minds, painting lyrics across the chalky white of their skulls.
I’ll take you away, it says, right at this moment (Hey)
The bright red sky is dancing (Hey)
We’re spinning and spinning, you and I (Oh, oh)
Praise it, make it echo louder, yeah (He-he, alright)
Nobody move, nobody move
Nobody move, nobody move.
It does not take long for the Northern troops to assemble a speaker of their own. It is just as tall and just as capable of unbearable volume as the South’s. The only real difference is that they’ve eschewed the gaudy mint green that the Southerners painted theirs, and the result is a speaker that looks undeniably handmade, compiled with a patchwork of greyish-brown metals. And while some of the Southerners make jokes over how janky, how poor the thing looks, their superiors recognize that this too is a declaration of perilous ideology. It is the myth of guerrilla warfare, of the underdogs versus the evil hegemony, of unarmed citizens facing off against factory-made tanks. There are even a few Southern generals who suggest swapping out the green paint with something less flashy, but it’s quickly decided that this would look like weakness. They have their mythos. We have ours. Besides, nobody will focus on what the speaker looks like once they hear Northern music played alongside theirs. They’ve had the same rigid, militaristic anthems for decades—it’s no wonder that K-pop has such an impact.
Very few of the Northern soldiers are briefed on what exactly their speakers will be playing, and when the broadcast begins, there is an immediate worry that their machines are malfunctioning. Instead of singing, there is only a low, pressurized ambience, a static hum. It sounds like a broken television or a distant laundry machine malfunctioning down a cavernous hallway. There are furrowed brows, glances back and forth to one another, a few prideful smirks from the Southern soldiers. Then there is a scream, so sharp and bone-chilling that it smacks the grins from the Southerner’s faces. It is a woman’s scream. It is piercing in its horror. The scream echoes across the border and slashes through clouds, and for a moment, nobody can hear the K-pop at all. And then, as if awakened from a dark, awful slumber, the other North Korean speakers are brought to life.
The sound is a nightmarish wall of snarling animals, ghostly moans over hellish wind, indecipherable chanting, all layered over a constant ambiance of groaning metal. There are no time signatures or rhythms to hold on to—this is hammer against metal railing, raspy shrieks that waver between terror and hysteria, all blanketed over some discarded motor filled with spoiled gasoline, the way smoke sounds pouring into a room.
This would be mind-numbing by itself, but played at an ungodly volume alongside the K-pop, it is unfathomably awful. Over the following days, there’s a tug of war to see who can go louder. Lines of South Korean trucks arrive with loudspeakers that slowly lift out of the vehicles like bread rising from a toaster. Speakers appear on North Korean beaches, and their sounds dig depressions into sand, hitching rides on gusts of wind. Coils of barbed wire tremble and shake. Soldiers open their lockers to find that their personal belongings have been shaken off their shelves. The mess hall’s post-lunch tables are splattered with kimchi juice and soup scum.
There is a growing concern among troops and generals stationed in the radius of the speakers—a private, unanimous fear that they are gradually losing the ability to discern one sound from the other. They feel their ears working to rationalize with the brain, blending both frequencies into one amorphous song. It is teenage romance against a backdrop of murder. It is ambient evil stitched together with giggling joy. Wolves howl over distorted gunshots. Nobody move, nobody move.
Unlike the soldiers, the 138 citizens of Daeseong-dong do not feel the need to hide their discomfort. There are no distant barracks they can drive off to, no vacation on Jeju waiting for them on the other side of military service. Their small border village has been nestled within the DMZ since before the war, composed entirely of original residents and their descendants. About a mile away from them—on the other side of the 38th parallel—is their once-sister village of Kijŏng-dong. Years ago, neighbors and family members woke up to find their two villages separated by an invisible, uncrossable line. They spent those first few years of separation staring across the border towards outlines in the dark, searching for loved ones, sending prayers into the sky.
When the villagers first noticed the speakers being erected, they expected the North to retaliate with speakers of their own within the week. Many lived through the “flagpole wars” of the 1980s, where each country’s government spent months building and rebuilding flagpoles in the villages, each side determined to have theirs higher than the other’s. Older villagers remembered when the very first loudspeakers were erected—those mild-mannered broadcasts that preached the wonders of Seoul and the beauty of life under democracy. Sometimes, the wind would carry over announcements from the North, and they’d catch scraps of sentences beckoning them to cross over, to reunite with their family members and join them under the shade of their leader’s love, his glorious love.
The new speakers, however, are nothing like the old ones. These speakers are different. This is K-pop blasted at a frequency that tramples interiority and sings in the face of sleep. Rickety windows barely keep out the cold, and the music passes through wood and glass like they’re nothing. When the North joins in, the inability to sleep mutates into a complete fraying of reality. Farmers refuse to leave their houses with sounds of moaning spirits howling through the air. There is what sounds like a chimpanzee smashing wrinkled fists into a piano, baring yellow teeth with curved lips and rolled eyes. Others report hearing gunshots high above the clouds or growling children lurking in the river. They imagine the sounds from both country’s speakers like termites, melting into the bones of their houses, traveling up their foundations and releasing up through sun-dried floors. The elderly plead with the soldiers who usher them through doors for their 23:00 curfews. Spend ten days living here! they scream. Let’s see if you can last one day. Let’s see that! Let’s see it!
In another nearby village—the small island community of Ganghwa—children stop sleeping entirely and grow terrible sores in their mouths. Students stay home from school, and those still forced to attend lay face down on their desks in something stronger than sleep. Parents call politicians in Seoul, holding their phones to the chaos in the sky, shouting profanities to lawmakers in faraway cities. One man, the father of six-week-old twins, decides he can no longer watch his children’s tiny hands reaching up to their ears, screaming and kicking through day and night. In his perpetually half-awake stupor, he looks at his children and imagines them as adults; their faces swirling abstractions that pulse and steam with the noise that plagued them as toddlers. In the night, he takes a small paddleboat to the Southern shore and intends to sneak into a military compound undetected. He wants to unplug one of the loudspeakers, just one. He has not thought clearly about the severity of this crime or even how one of these speakers might be silenced, but for weeks now he’s felt a hatred for his own country’s role in starting this pissing contest. He army-crawls across moonlit fields, earning cuts on his arms and face as he presses through uncut foliage. The music is getting closer, thicker in the air around him. He squints at a sign warning of active mines left over from the war, but the part of his brain in command of risk assessment is so glazed over and empty that he presses forward towards the noise.
The three soldiers who capture him report a crazed, wide-eyed man emerging from some shrubbery. Their report states that the man had cuts across his arms and face, thin streams of blood curving down his cheekbones. The soldiers report surrounding the man, meeting eyes with one another, and slowly closing in on him in a tight little triangle. They restrained him, placed him in a truck, and drove him to a medical center outside of the DMZ.
Notably absent from this report is how, in the days following the arrest, all three soldiers are unable to sleep. They’re stuck on how quiet the man had been once they’d clipped the handcuffs on him. It’d felt like pushing a corpse, walking him to the truck. His head had bobbed with each bump in the road like there was nothing but air and smoke in his neck. Is this waiting for them at the end of these sleepless nights and restless days? How long had it taken for the music to smother that man into silence, and why didn’t he fight back? Why didn’t he even try?
In Pyongyang, the Supreme Leader lies awake in his bedroom, worrying. He is not ignorant to the fact that the North cannot compete with the mammoths of culture pounding at their door. He’s heard plenty of K-pop. He’s watched their glossy, impossibly precise videos with their airbrushed performers that transcend barriers of language and state. He’s outlawed the possession of outside media, but he knows that just because a sound is silenced, does not mean that it is dead. He knows this because he is no idiot. A song holds your attention until it is replaced by a better one—something catchier, more seductive. Sound might remain fixed in the glowing amber of space and time, but regimes disappear all the time. They cannot survive frozen in place forever.
He gets out of bed and writes a memo to his advisors. There will be no more wasted resources, no more plugging up leaks with short-term solutions. He thinks of his father, of his father’s father, of the moments where they were forced to pivot from defense to offense. And when the memo is completed and the assembly is set, he stands at his window and stares off into the vast quiet of the night, imagining all the music that had ever been played here and all the music to come.
The following afternoon, the Supreme Leader makes a declaration. On a crisp, dewy morning, military officials gather to watch him declare that the punishment for distribution of Southern media is escalating. Things have changed, he says. He tells them of the perverted puppet media spreading across the country, how severely it must be eradicated. And if one could see his voice above this group of men it would look like the heat waves that add curve and glare to desert highways. It is a voice so full and magnificent that it is almost visible, a voice that finds a spot in the atmosphere to burrow uncontested, staining deep and long into the grid of power and dominion that sits just behind vision. It is sound that does not evaporate into the air but festers in a frequency unable to be heard or seen, one that echoes its declaration of rabid quivering punishment across future past and present.
In the South, another plan has already been set in motion. Complaints from those living in the radius of the loudspeakers have started to gather support from larger, stronger countries. There is a growing belief that they’re engaged in a juvenile feud with the North—that they are two petulant children throwing sand in each other’s eyes.
There’s that speech, though—proof that the music is having an impact. The men who hatched the idea for the speakers recite leaked transcripts of the Supreme Leader’s declaration from the North, and while they hear the power in his voice, they also hear fear, fear, fragile and cold in each of his words. The young physicist assigned to the project—the same one who spoke of time and space and glowing blocks of amber—has another idea. He has an idea built from decades of expensive, private labor and Northern revolutionaries. It is a plan that the physicist claims will work alongside their music at the border, sowing the seeds of revolt deep beneath the Northern cities. As he speaks, the hunched, withered politicians sour on this boy. The idea is shot down, deemed strange and unrealistic. They will continue adding speakers to the border, and in time they’ll develop amplifiers powerful enough to carry the music all the way to the alps of Manchuria.
What these men do not realize is that the wheels for the young physicist’s proposed plan are already spinning. It is a rat’s plan, a dream that skitters through undetected while giants chase at ghosts. It is a plan birthed miles and miles beneath Seoul, in a damp little room hidden in darkness. There is music being sent down to this place, to this underground bunker. There’s a man down there with a song, and he feeds it into a web of cords and wires that are then activated with staccato pulses of careful electricity, just enough to keep the track fed for the full length of its imminent journey. A button is pressed, and this song—this thick fist of a song—streams from a table-sized circuit board, moving through braids of tangled wiring like a mouse passing with lurching speed through a snake’s stomach. Within seconds this cord disappears into a bullet-sized hole in the wall, into darkness, moving through tiny underground tunnels with silent buzzing heat. The wires sizzle far beyond the training facility, coming together and then splitting apart like veins underneath the Earth’s skin, tunnelling through darkened soil and bone and fossilized blood. The song flows beneath the city of Paju, under coffee shops where baristas wear dirty flip flops and the bathroom codes are only for tourists. The wires zigzag beneath streets where old sun-raisined men scream out GOGUMA! GOGUMA! SWEET POTATO! SWEET POTATO! past the outskirts of the city, where the few elderly ones who remember what war was like slurp dog soup, quietly, so as not to offend the younger generation. The wires split and connect again, passing the bolt of electric data off like a baton in a relay race, approaching the dividing line, the 38th parallel, the border. There’s a muffled hum in the soil, one that grows louder by the second.
Bass shakes the dirt here, sending pebbles trickling down onto the wiring, and while there haven’t been any cave-ins yet, there certainly will be. As if understanding this—as if this three-minute recording has its own lizard-brained survival instincts—the song within the wiring picks up speed, bolts across the Imjin River. It passes beneath the Joint Security Area, beneath soldiers with bloodshot eyes and minds like writhing animals. Over the past month these men have felt themselves inching closer and closer to violence. They feel their fingers hovering over curved triggers, daydream of gunfights louder than the air surrounding them.
And then the song blinks across the border, past its soldiers and sleepless villagers, speeding far enough north that the wall of sound is shushed into silence. This is a different place—the little tunnels here are sharper, more deliberate, made with weaker tools and stronger hands. Wind grazes through empty rice fields, ripples puddles. The wires loop around the mile-deep roots of skeletal buildings; husks of stone and glass designed to hold strong against hurricanes and bullets and time. They rush beneath a rusted, warping satellite tower and its imaginary shield, its dome of protection from glowing eyes disguised as stars, those American satellites looming over them from above.
Hardened soil shifts as the tunnel curves, bending cords and electrons where its long-dead architects changed course, narrowly avoiding blood clots of rock and mountain. Still the particles of data stream through, and when the razor-thin tunnel approaches the outskirts of Pyongyang, the wires split into thirds, burst up towards solid ground in bolts of thunderous communion, racing towards a small dot of muted light, a hole in the wall of a hidden room in a cavernous basement.
This is a room where a thin, nervous man sits at a desk in front of a monitor, sneaking glances over his shoulder, his face bathed in a cold, digital light. Ropes of electricity leak down from that hole in his wall, snake across the floor into a small, taped-together computer, far cheaper than the circuit board where the song began its journey. The machine sucks up the file, releasing its wave of electric data over bootlegged bits and sensors, over that handicapped motherboard. The song turns to static, dissolves into the CPU like salt in a boiling pot, moving through an impossible process of translation until the song is condensed and contained, frozen in a digital shell of ones and zeros.
There is soft, stifled breath in this cramped, tucked away room. There’s the clatter of shaking fingers on keyboard, the click of a mouse. The man’s face turns from the glow of the monitor down to the humming machine on the floor, to a miniature flash drive shrapneled in its side. He has heard stories of the songs—descriptions of forbidden melodies in hushed, frantic whispers. He thinks of public executions, dry-mouthed excuses. He swallows, tastes copper in his gums, then bends down to remove the tiny thumb drive. And even though he knows it’s an illusion, there’s a moment where he feels that little stick of metal vibrate between his fingers, pulsing with everything that’s been locked away inside it, rattling in its new, tiny cage. He opens up a laptop on the edge of his desk—some old Chinese model smuggled across foreign waters. He inserts the flash drive, begins slowly transferring the files onto this cracked, stuttering machine. There’s a dense heat rising up from beneath the keyboard, accompanied by a steady, terrible groan, as if the laptop’s internal bands and levers can barely lift the data’s weight.
Footsteps pass behind the room’s locked door. There are voices down the hall, whispering to one another, whispering, and when the progress bar finishes its slow crawl from left to right, the man plugs a pair of tangled earphones into the laptop, holds them close against his head to avoid any sound from spilling out.
He lowers the brightness on the laptop’s screen until it’s hushed into darkness. This is what the song came here for, where its real journey begins. It travels up through the man’s eardrums, through that hidden cocktail of hope and paranoia deep inside the body. There’s a palpable shift in the room’s weight, the buzz of something passing over the heart like a grainy promise, like that half-remembered kiss of safety from childhood. Memory, nostalgia, and wanting, coursing through veins, sending unfamiliar chemicals bursting like seeds between grooves of an anxious brain. He can feel the song’s rhythm, its bass, its lyrics, that song, that song. Young, gorgeous singers, coming together, splitting apart, igniting the buried hope that the person you long for might long for you too, or that secret, wonderful suspicion that out of everybody it’s you, yourself who are special. The song takes hold of the man’s feet, his fingers, beckoning him to move alongside its every beat, pulling at the secret glowing core within his heart, offering proof that the dreams he’s hidden behind the mildewed wallpaper of his mind aren’t just dreams, and they cannot be hidden. Nobody move, nobody move.