Pharmakon

Margaret Chardiet, A.K.A. Pharmakon, makes some exceptionally dark music. Stripped-down, sparse, and angrily, burningly raw, her music, a personal and minimalistic form of industrial, sounds as oppressive as the creeping horror of a medieval plague, or the mechanical operation of a death camp. It’s punishing to listen to, and carries with it the power to heavily traumatise. Chardiet is not fucking around here. Her music is a conveyor belt of stained, steely terror, and it’s an immeasurably badass collection of work.

There are two albums floating around at the moment, at least two that I know of, which are the ones that have made it into the crowded, stagnant river of the mainstream. Low in track number but loaded with thick, gloopy misery, Abandon came thundering into my life in 2013, while Bestial Burden came out last year, and in between Pharmakon herself suffered a cyst so large that it nearly killed her, and had to undergo some nasty surgery that undoubtedly added a bitter new philosophy to her already vicious style of sound. The two albums are similar in their technique, but are by no means less individual, and I find it impossible to imagine either of them becoming, y'know, stale and 'samey', even after maybe a thousand listens. Pharmakon's tracks have a recognisable formula of a bludgeoning percussive base, with a layer of unearthly atmospherics, all brought together with her maniacal vocal cords bleeding profusely over the top. She wails, she laughs, she hisses, she mutters, but she mostly screams, with the throat-splitting intensity of a believable despair that sends shivers down the spines of your ancestors. Her versatility is her greatest asset. On ‘Crawling on Bruised Knees’, for instance, she uses electronic wizardry to turn her voice into a desperate and vulnerable wobble, an absolute stroke of genius that gives her voice a jarring inhuman quality.

Occasionally her sound will descend into whirring clouds of sheer madness, as with the ghostly utterances that end the otherwise white-knuckle ‘Ache’ on the first LP, but my personal favourite is the end of ‘Bestial Burden’ itself, an already maddeningly pensive track with a ‘bass line’ that sounds like the shadow of a swinging meat pendulum, which gets thicker and thicker with ominous fear, Pharmakon’s echoing voice dithering between little-girl-lost and frustrated, roaring monstrosity, laughing and laughing until the track builds to a whirlwind of laughter, screams, white noise and distorted hellish lunacy that closes a brilliantly brutal album. Bestial Burden, the album, is a masterwork. Pharmakon herself described it as her ‘desire to show the body as 'a lump of flesh and cells that mutate and betray you’, with one of the tracks even being named ‘Body Betrays Itself’, and sounds like the inevitable approach of an invisible enemy. In many ways, this shows how Bestial Burden is a piece of autobiography as well as an ambient horrorshow. There are less attempts at witchy darkness on this LP, as there were with ‘Pitted’, for instance, and instead the album is more concerned with being grounded in the material reality where the human body can spontaneously murder itself, as shown by adding the suffocating sounds of panic-attack breathing and a long section of someone coughing up something disgusting. It’s stunning, in the sense of the final moments of an ill-fated cow in a sheet-metal slaughterhouse.

Pharmakon’s music is terrifying, electrifying, powerful, vulnerable, heartfelt and cruel. She may be the result of a long line of horrifying factory-music predecessors, but it’s undeniable that in her thus-far brief body of inspiringly abominable work, Chardiet has built herself a recognisable and immense style whereby both her body and soul are hung from sharpened staves and hoisted over a throbbing landscape of genuine and palpable human misery. If that sounds like the sort of listening experience that would fascinate you beyond belief, as it does me, then I highly recommend you check her out. But beware: if there’s any music that truly isn’t for the faint of heart, it’s these two magnificent albums.