On the musicSonic influences: Sufjan Stevens (Come on feel the Illinoise), Radiohead (Kid A), Fleet Foxes (self titled), and Devotchka’s song “The Winner Is”. The happy accident echo present in Session 01: Marrow has been reduced significantly. Marrow’s echo was the cave. Confluence is the mouth of it.

On the sessionSession 02: Confluence runs 46 minutes. The first and last five minutes are music and binaural tones only; narration runs from minute 5 through minute 40. Headphones are required for the binaural effect to work.

On the frequenciesThe binaural beat in Confluence is set at 5 Hz, low theta range, produced by a 200 Hz tone in the left ear and a 205 Hz tone in the right. Your brain perceives the difference between them as a third tone that doesn’t exist in the room. Theta (4–8 Hz) is associated with flow states, creative access, emotional processing, and the liminal space between waking and sleep. You can’t hear 5 Hz directly, but the brain will sync to it over time. This is why the first five minutes of the session are music only, the nervous system needs the on-ramp before the voice arrives.

I obviously didn’t notice until I played it back. And then I sat there for a minute, listening to my own voice bouncing off of itself in this cavernous way that sounded nothing like any closet I’ve ever been in. And while I appreciated the trippy aesthetic, it was not really what I was going for. So…..

I was going to re-record it tonight, after I took my son to the movies.

Narrators voice: She did not, however, re-record it.

Here is what happened instead:

Levi wanted to see Backrooms. I said yes because I say yes to movies with Levi, and because I vaguely knew it was an A24 horror film about fluorescent hallways and internet creepypasta and I figured it would be weird and fun and mostly fine.

And now, much like after my first viewing of Midsommar (another A24 cinematic delight), I can say with certainty, it was not mostly fine.

Not because it was gory, which it really isn’t. But because it was bizarrely accurate.

I want to be clear that this is my interpretation of the film, and I could be a skosh off- base. But I clocked what was happening very early. And instead of feeling scared in the way horror movies usually scare you, jump cuts, loud noises, things that go bump, I felt something quieter and more unsettling laying heavy on my chest.

I didn’t blink much. I just watched.

Because what I saw unfolding on that screen wasn’t a monster story. It was an excavation story. A man who had been holding the surface tension together for so long that when it finally cracked, it cracked all the way down. The Backrooms aren’t a place you go. They’re a place that was always there, waiting beneath the surface.

That’s not supernatural. That’s what accumulates when you’re too busy keeping the lights on to check what’s in the basement.

Backrooms is about a man named Clark, who slips through a wall in the basement of his failing furniture store and ends up in an extradimensional labyrinth he cannot seem to get out of. “The Backrooms”, full of endless fluorescent hallways, stale carpet, and the deafening drone of infrastructure that has outlived its purpose.

The horror isn’t the monsters, though there are monsters.

The horror is how Clark got there. He wasn’t doing anything dramatic. He was doing maintenance. Trying to fix the lights, he entered the impossible through a workplace problem. Reality glitched while a broken man was just trying to keep his store illuminated.

And the maze (here’s the part that got me feeling really self-aware in that theater) wasn’t waiting behind the wall.

It was waiting inside the life he’d already built.

I have felt that way. Not as a metaphor, but as a Tuesday. Too many times to count.

The life that keeps running after the meaning goes out of it. The competence that becomes its own kind of cage. The moment when you look at everything you’ve built. Everything that by most measures is fine, is good even, and realize you cannot fully inhabit it. The humanizing realization that something has been running underneath all of the chaos, scanning, compensating, keeping the lights on, while you were busy looking everywhere else.

That’s not a horror movie premise.

That’s quite literally, root depletion. Which is EXACTLY what I had just spent 33 minutes recording.

Clark slipped into the Backrooms through a faulty wall while doing maintenance.

I walked into Marrow through a faulty microphone setting in my closet.

The difference is that I knew I was going underneath. I built the door on purpose. And when I came back out, I had a recording, echo and all, of what it sounds like to press into the floor and confirm it’s still there.

So, after all that, the echo is staying put.

It’s about the only woo thing about this entire production. My microphone accidentally gave Marrow the sound of a room that exists inside a room. Which is, it turns out, exactly what the root chakra is.

I’m not going to fix that.

Some things are too coincidental to be accidental.

Backrooms is brilliant. I hope you get a chance to see it in the theater, like it deserves to be. Kane Parsons, dude. Dude! I hope this finds its way to you.

Check out the liner notes below to read what artists influenced this sessions music, and tips to get the most out of your Perimeditation session.

- erin

LINER NOTES — SESSION 01: MARROW

Sonic influences

Damien Rice / Andrew Bird / Nick Drake

Acoustic. Spare. No drums. No resolution. Just presence and the occasional cello doing something that makes you feel it in your sternum.Recorded at The Meditation Station - my walk-in closet with my crappy laptop, and a $50 USB mic. Mixed in Audacity. Ambient track generated in Suno. Binaural tones layered underneath.

FrequencyDelta / 1–4 Hz

Homecoming used Alpha: a doorway state, relaxed alertness. Marrow goes deeper. Delta is the most primal frequency range the nervous system knows. It’s where the body goes during deep dreamless sleep, the state associated with the most fundamental rest and restoration. For root work specifically, it made sense to go all the way down. You can’t excavate a foundation from the surface.

HeadphonesBinaural tones require separate audio in each ear to work. While headphones are optional, they are highly recommended for this session. Speakers won’t deliver the frequency. Any headphones will do.

A note on the echoYes, it’s intentional. No, it wasn’t planned. Read the Field Note.

Sonic influences: Khruangbin, Sigur Rós, and the long ambient passages of Pink Floyd. It’s warmth without urgency, weightlessness, the patient build that does not rush you anywhere.

Built with: Original ambient bed generated in Suno, layered and balanced in Audacity, with binaural tones woven underneath.

Frequency: Alpha, 10 Hz. Alpha is the brainwave range of relaxed alertness. Calm but awake, settled but still present. I chose it for Homecoming because a first session is not about drifting off; it is about arriving. Alpha is the doorway state: the body downshifts out of high alert without checking out entirely, so you can stay with my voice and still feel the floor come up to meet you. Headphones make the binaural effect work; without them, you will still get the music, just not the full undertow.