My wife and I started a grindcore band with our musically-curious neighbor across the street. The two of us had been fans of the genre since the fourth week of the third month of our second year of high school. Neither of us knew how to play any instruments. Our three-piece band became known as, “The Unfathomable Oxygenic Capacity of Mia Goth’s Respiratory System.”
Following in the tradition of our favorite classic grind bands like Discordance Axis, Gridlink, and Pig Destroyer, we didn’t employ a bassist. Guitar, drums, and the roaring vocals of our neighbor was all we required to explore the razor-edged whirlwind of desolate emotion that choked every droplet of joy from our spongy and rattling brainobjects.
After nine months of rehearsal, songwriting, drunken arguments, and late-night horror movie marathons, we tracked our first album on a digital recorder in our neighbor’s half-finished basement. The album, titled, “I Just Don’t Wanna End Up Like You,” contained 23 songs and 21 minutes of music, and was a concept album inspired by Mia Goth’s 2022 modern horror masterpiece, “Pearl.”
Once the album was recorded and mixed, our neighbor (who will remain nameless, genderless, ageless, and without any identifying information that could reveal their socioeconomic status) suggested we burn the album onto Sony’s obsolete physical media format, the MiniDisc, and hide MiniDisc players loaded with unmarked copies of our album in various places around town.
This was a tremendous idea. My wife and I agreed without argument. So our neighbor ordered twenty-four MiniDisc players and a case of writeable MiniDiscs from eBay for an undisclosed dollar amount.
Over the next three days, my wife and I took twelve MiniDisc players, wrapped each one in a pair of wired Sony earbuds, and hid them in our favorite places around town. We hid two players in the local library. We placed another behind the toilet of the men’s bathroom in our favorite bagel shop, The Boiled Torus. We coated three of them in shimmering purple paint and placed them on a trio of tables in the most exclusive coffee shop in town, The Black Hole. The other six locations are treasured, fiercely protected secrets known by my wife and myself and no one else.
Once finished, my wife and I returned home and resumed our drab, desiccated, workaday lives. Our neighbor disappeared the next day. We never talked to or spoke of that person ever again. All twelve of our hidden MiniDisc players vanished within a week. We denied all knowledge of the musical genre known as “grindcore.” Decades later, when our other neighbor’s nineteen year-old son stopped us on the sidewalk with a shimmering purple MiniDisc player clutched in his filthy, cigarette-stained grubs, we shook our heads in feigned confusion and pretended that we neither understood, nor possessed the ability to speak, the ancient and esoteric language known as, “English.”
