WITHER AND WARP arrives in the wake of the newly announced 5th studio album from Pharmakon, Maggot Mass, scheduled for release on October 4th via her long-standing label home Sacred Bones. Pre-order HERE.
”If our value were determined instead by the richness of our reciprocation to the very fabric of being, the very existence of existence, our role in the ecosystem of land and of people… then who could say that a human being has more worth than a measly maggot?”
So questions Pharmakon introducing the concept behind her fifth record, Maggot Mass.
Since the early 2010s, Margaret Chardiet’s work under the moniker Pharmakon has used sound art techniques to cultivate expansive industrial atmospheres. Arriving after a five-year hiatus, it portrays a repulsion towards the toxic relationship humans have created with the environment, about self and each other’s destruction, a reconciliation of grief and loss on both a personal and global scale, a sought-after solace by envisioning rebirth through death.
WITHER AND WARP came to life after a vivid dream about ego death in which the concept of self disappeared and Chardiet faded into the earth. Opening with the sticky sound of buzzing insects, the nearly nine-minute track manifests as a swamp of nasty drones and dense, cavernous guitars. “As rotting matter / I will make / A good mother / Wet nurse to carrion feeders / Suckling from my wither and warp,” Chardiet snarls in the opening lines. It’s a fitting introduction to an album that confronts our capitalistic society head-on. Listen HERE.
”The lyrics for this song began with a euphoric and vividly hallucinatory dream. In it, “I” did not exist, simply was. Without memory, identity, or ego. Suspended outside of time – only present moment. Oblivion” Pharmakon shares speaking on the track. ”Without true thought, merely sensations that felt as comforting as they were unfamiliar: I sensed the prickled growing pains of an extending root, and the tingle of minerals soaking through it. I heard a chattering flow of information pass through me, all chemical communication. A vague awareness collected slowly, of being the moss that cushioned a stone. Enraptured in the beauty of existence as a plant, a producer who takes only sun, air, and water to reciprocate multitudes in return”.
”In this dream, I my “self” was dead. I had passed away into the earth, becoming part of it, or many parts of it – through the divine transfiguration of decay. And I was more content in this mode of being than I ever was with life as a human. This dream-logic hinged upon the hope that when we die, the body merely breaks down back into the energy that was trapped inside its’ matter. And all the carrion-eaters who might devour “you” will surely take “you” into “them”, rendering your death back into the folds of life” she adds. ”This song represents the ecstasy of that dream… joy in (a lack of) existence, the self scattered throughout many forms of being. How sweet the vision of a death without waste. But as always, we must awaken from such sweet dreams…”
The fifth full-length sees the resurrection of the project after a five-year hiatus. From the death of an internal set of rules and structures that Chardiet built for Pharmakon at its’ conception, the project is reborn in a new form: this album marks a notable pivot in sonic, vocal, and lyrical styles for the 17-year project, hearkening to Industrial and Punk while still maintaining its’ vitriolic and experimental roots in Power Electronics and Noise.
”Maggot Mass is bred out of a disgust for the dysfunctional relationship that humans have developed with our environment and the rest of life on Earth. It touches on the wounds of loneliness inflicted by that broken bond, and asks us to face the mirror in acknowledgement of our personal and systemic culpability” Pharmakon states as an introduction to the album. ”What peace can be made with privilege, when we understand the true cost of our comfort is death and not dollar? What peace can be made with death when we impose on it the same bankrupt pecking order in which we organize our lives? To what extent is life worth living in the solitude of this self-imposed species loneliness?” they continue to question.
”Human beings measure our worth only in relation to our selves, on the scale of an endless and exponential accumulation of things. This is what we call wealth. This is what we deem to be power. We calculate our meaning in money, assets and objects. Influence, superiority, and control” Pharmakon says. ”Western heritage dictates a hierarchy of beings, and places ourselves at the very apex of evolution. We think of ourselves as somehow separate from the rest of the “natural world,” its’ primary narrators, and at the center of every orbit. This delusion transforms bodies into objects, land into property, and people into expendable tools”.
”A maggot eats death and alchemizes it back into life: breaking down matter and recycling its’ nutrients. One gift begets another. It soon undergoes its’ miraculous transfiguration into a fly, and continues on to pollinate 70% of plants: midwives and messengers to the flora of Earth. And we? We pollute instead of pollinate” Pharmakon expands on the album’s critical themes of net losses to the diversity of life on the planet, the degradation and death of those who are trampled just to serve their greed.
” In the past I didn’t allow myself to rhyme, use traditional structures of poetry, and avoided pronouns at all costs” she states on the lyrical content and stylings that underpin the album. ”So this time I incorporated all of those tropes, and wrote from a more familiar and direct voice to the listener. I also wanted to explore new ways of using my voice besides speaking or screaming, and experimented with new vocalizations balancing strain and hoarseness with melody and cadence”.
Compositionally, I never allowed myself to use any traditional song structures, and this time allowed myself to dabble into “music” instead of strictly “noise”. This resulted in “solos” and “bridges” and “verses and choruses” sprinkled throughout the record.
once I slough
off this human skin
I will find my home
and ancestral kin…
in the coffin-birth
of my cadaver’s ecosystem
Maggot Mass Tracklist –
1. WITHER AND WARP
2. METHANAL DOLL
3. BUYER’S REMORSE
4. SPLENDID ISOLATION
5. OILED ANIMALS
Pharmakon Live Dates –
Sept 30 – Innsbruck, AT @ PMK
Oct 1 – Zurich, CH @ Dynamo
Oct 2 – Frankfurt, DE @ WW2 Bunker
Oct 3 – Hamburg, DE @ Hafenklang
Oct 5 – Uppsala, SE @ Otherworldly Festival
Oct 6 – Oslo, SE @ Vaterland
Oct 7 – Jonkoping, SE @ The Hush Hush Club
Oct 8 – Gothenburg, SE @ Oceanen
Oct 9 – Copenhagen, DK @ Loppen
Oct 11 – Nijmegen, NL @ Soulcrusher
Oct 12 – Brussels, BE @ Magasin 4
Oct 13 – London, UK @ Underworld
Oct 15 – Dunkirk, FR @ 4Ecluses
Oct 17 – Berlin, DE @ Cassiopeia
Oct 18 – Poznań, PL @ Pawilion
Oct 19 – Lodz, PL @ DOM
Oct 20 – Prague, CZ @ Bike Jesus
Oct 21 – Brno, CZ @ Kabinet Muz
Oct 22 – Budapest, HU @ Instant
Oct 23 – Zagreb, HR @Mochvara
Oct 25 – Ljubljana, SL @ Gromka
Oct 26 – Bologna, IT @ Improved Sequence II Festival
Pharmakon | Instagram | Bandcamp | Spotify | YouTube
Sacred Bones | Website | Instagram | Bandcamp | Facebook | X | YouTube
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