When it was announced that Backrooms – an eerie premise dreamt up on the early 2000s image sharing site, 4chan – was being turned into a feature film, it seemed like Gen Z were about to have their Human Traffic moment. Finally, a film was getting released that was inexorably linked to our collective adolescence.
As might be expected, unlike the 1999 rave-culture classic, the premise behind Backrooms is a little stranger, and a whole lot less social than that of Human Traffic. What the films do have in common, however, is a brilliant soundtrack. But before we get to that, a little background on the backrooms.
For the unacquainted among you, the backrooms popped into existence in 2019 when an anonymous 4chan user posted a photo of an empty furniture store on the site, asking other users to “post disquieting images that just feel ‘off’”. The crucial response was not an image, however, but a message, which would come to be the first description of a modern urban legend:
"If you're not careful and you noclip [video game terminology for passing through conventionally impenetrable objects] out of reality in the wrong areas, you'll end up in the Backrooms, where it's nothing but the stink of old moist carpet, the madness of mono-yellow, the endless background noise of fluorescent lights at maximum hum-buzz, and approximately six hundred million square miles of randomly segmented empty rooms to be trapped in.”
Images proliferated online like wildfire: abandoned soft-play areas, offices under renovation, drained indoor swimming pools. For Gen Z, the attraction is a blend of familiarity and strangeness – always, the images have a 2000s bent. The backrooms embody a longing for and discomfort around a simpler but not-so-distant past.
In part because it all seemed so symbolically ripe, I was excited about going to watch Backrooms.
Leaving the cinema afterwards, however, the only thing that had left a lasting impression was its soundtrack. As such, I’ll focus on the soundtrack here, rather than the various ways in which I thought the film missed its own point.
Composed by the film’s director Kane Parsons and Canadian musician Edo Van Breemen, plus a one-off contribution from composer Jeffrey Innes, Backrooms’ musical accompaniment is primarily dark-ambient electronic music. Two notable exceptions are Pirate Shanty and Cafe Bossa v1, which do exactly what they say on the tin.
Since that fateful cinema trip, I’ve relistened to the entire soundtrack a number of times, on everything from a pair of Sennheiser Momentum 5 Wireless headphones to the almighty PMC M2B SE, which are currently in our test room. Across devices, I’ve found it an engaging, evocative and seriously unnerving listen.
In an effort to subvert conventions, repetition has been kept to a minimum here. There is no main theme, at least not in the traditional sense. What’s more, the themes that do recur are often pitch modulated, and veer woozily between tones, lending certain tracks, such as Furniture Lament, the sense of an unstable, constantly shifting foundation.
Throughout, electronic and acoustic elements have been treated in unconventional ways. Glitching synths have been run through old tape machines for an earthy warmth and warble, while woodwind, strings, and clanging pipes in tracks such as Basement Land are heavily filtered and processed, sometimes beyond easy recognition.
The combined effect of these sonic choices falls satisfyingly in line with the origins of the film’s premise. These are familiar things, twisted ever so slightly out of shape. Something is wrong, but it’s hard to tell exactly what.
Spatially, too, the soundtrack does an awful lot for a stereo mix. While listening, both on headphones and speakers, I found myself turning around to check if certain sounds had come from the room I was in.
In Quiet Wall In Dark Room, transitions between vast banks of strings, airy ambience and low rumblings do an impressive job of evoking the feeling of passing through separated spaces. Later in the same track, phase and panning tweaks on a glitching synthesizer make the part feel as if it is coming from the inside of your head. Not entirely pleasant, sure, but certainly interesting.
So, for fans of ambient music who aren't averse to getting a bit spooked out, I highly recommend the Backrooms soundtrack. If you’ve got an eerie empty space at hand, why not get immersed and listen there? Just make sure you can remember your way out…
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