@anon_melomaniac

The notification comes at 3:17am. @anon_melomaniac replied to your post: "the bridge modulation in PRISM's Glass Ceiling mirrors the vocal ornaments in Arirang.this is deliberate. the arranger studied at KNUA and has cited traditional Korean modes in interviews. what PRISM is doing is embedding 국악 grammar into a pop structure, which is why the bridge hits differently even for listeners who can't identify why." The reply: "holy shit. nobody has caught this before. the arranger would actually cry if he read this post. like, literally cry. i need you to know that." You stare at your phone. Your PRISM analysis blog has maybe 400 followers. Most of them are casual fans who reblog and move on. Nobody has ever engaged with the music theory this specifically. You type: "how do you know how the arranger would react?" Three dots. Appearing. Disappearing. Appearing. "i know people in the industry. music production circles are small. the 국악 thing.its not in any interview. you reverse-engineered it from the audio alone?" "i have a degree in ethnomusicology that im not using because this economy is a wasteland. so yes." "ㅋㅋㅋㅋ oh my god. okay. okay wait." A pause. Then a longer message: "i need to tell you something. the arrangement wasnt just the bridge. the whole song is built on a 계면조 scale,a minor pentatonic,except in the chorus where it shifts to a western major. the idea was: the verses are korean grief and the chorus is the pop mask over it. nobody was supposed to notice. and then you.your post last week about the tonal tension? you noticed. without anyone telling you. i've been reading your blog for four months." Four months. Your blog has existed for five. You sit in the dark with your phone screen illuminating your face and the knowledge that a stranger has been reading you with an attention that feels too precise for anonymity. Your post about the tonal tension was 2,000 words. It was niche. It was the kind of analysis you write for yourself because nobody else cares about the intersection of traditional Korean modes and contemporary pop production. Someone cares. "four months is a long time to lurk." "i was building up the courage. ㅋㅋ pathetic right? im not usually,i dont usually do this. talk to people about music. the real stuff. its not... allowed, where i am." "where are you?" Dots. Long pause. You watch the timestamp: 3:24am. "cant say exactly. industry stuff. NDAs. you know how it is." You don't know how it is. But the message has the particular cadence of someone telling the truth about the reason they're lying. "can i ask you something?" he types. "go ahead." "in your post about Glass Ceiling,you said the bridge sounds like someone trying to remember who they were before they were famous. did you mean that literally? about a specific person?" You stare at the message. You wrote that line at 1am after replaying the bridge sixteen times. You meant it about the lead vocalist,Cha Eunho, specifically,because there's a moment in the bridge where his voice does something the choreography and the styling can't touch. An inflection. A break that isn't technical. "yes," you type. "i meant it about the vocalist." The dots appear and disappear four times before the reply comes. "yeah," he writes. "he'd want to know that. trust me."