ATTN:Magazine

The loops are walls. Recurrent pulses and buzzes repeat until they solidify, thickening into three inches of steel, then four as the loop returns again, asserting themselves on all sides of the stereo frame, sealing off all potential routes of exit. For a record that concerns itself with the act of transcendence – travelling out of the body via an intensely physical music – these loops are a paradox. So often I perceive looping as an spiritually projective act, repeating gestures until they shed their corporeal surface and become something much more profound. There’s an element of that on Contact. Yet ultimately, I can’t shake the sense that the loops are the very barrier to transcendent escape. These clotted lattices of feedback and object rise like totemic amalgams of junkyard mess, funnelling rust into amputated car doors and crooked girder limbs into hunks of unidentifiable grey. I’m surrounded by incestuous, violently serrated odes to materialism and our preoccupation with waste. Distortion and electronics intensify. The walls get higher and thicker.

In a bid to overcome the very barricade she’s built for herself, I hear Margaret Chardiet forcing her spirit upward out of her mouth. It’s the only way out. As the walls creep higher her screams become louder, ejected like missiles into the sky, vacating her body in a manner that feels anguished but also thoroughly liberated. On tracks like “No Natural Order” – where her shrieks catapult off the sounds of explosion and ascend through splinters of glass – am I bearing witness to an emotional intensity? Or is this simply the physical force required to unbind the voice from the flesh that brings it to be? Just as the loops of noise signify both the quest for transcendence and its very obstruction (so beautifully encapsulated in the eternally ascending glissando cocoon of “Sentient”, whose upward trajectory is little but an illusion), Chardiet’s voice co-opts the vocalisations of human despondency to press away from worldly concern, embodying shrill terror and hyperventilated despair until she bursts right out of them. The walls are high, but Pharmakon’s determination stretches higher still.

Drowned In Sound 80

A significant factor in Bestial Burden’s success was its willingness to take the long way round. Too many power electronics artists have mistaken the feral malevolence of Whitehouse for a template, when really it was little more than a gesture of the direction in which noise music could travel. It is telling that the most impactful acts in this most extreme of subgenres have been those capable of finding new ways of engaging with its core themes.

Chardiet has accomplished this by taking the bodily concerns of acts like Whitehouse to more realistic extremes. The cover art has been as much a part of this as anything. Remember the maggots that covered Chardiet on Abandon and the animal organs that adorned her form on Bestial Burden. Contact’s cover is perhaps the most intense yet, seemingly depicting Chardiet being smothered by the slimy hands of others. The extreme imagery of these three albums’ cover art has been mirrored in their music. Pharmakon records have not looked to shock through cheap tactics but instead through providing a musical representation of the body’s physical weakness. At times on Bestial Burden this approach was genuinely horrifying, reminiscent of an early David Cronenberg movie come to life.

So, whilst good power electronics is about more than uncompromising noise, a good dose of the good stuff in this department cannot hurt. Contact starts with ominous stabs of electronics and gentle throbs of obscured bass. It recalls – to these ears at least – the atmospheric sonic build-up of Ennio Morricone and John Carpenter’s soundtrack for The Thing. The sense of foreboding such comparisons may appear to conjure up is swiftly swallowed whole, however, by Chardiet’s dextrous shrieks. Similar tricks are applied on ‘Transmission’ (incidentally, the intro to this actually does sound like Morricone’s aforementioned classic horror theme). This time, however, Chardiet’s vocal parts feel even more pushed to the limit, as if her vocal cords are being shredded as you listen.

‘Sleepwalking Form’, appropriately given its title, is a hazier affair, in which the disorientating collapse of different banks of noise into one another assumes the appearance of a night terror. Closer ‘No Natural Order’ twists this phantasm into ever more disturbing forms, with Chardiet’s vocals yet again reaching new levels of intensity. This final outing sees Contact threaten to outdo its two (fairly immaculate) predecessors. Ranking Pharmakon’s output to date ultimately seems counterintuitive however. This record is better placed alongside, rather than in opposition to, Chardiet’s prior two releases. It’s another excellent entry in her catalogue of searingly distressing, and physically exhausting, noise.

Tiny Mix Tapes 80

Pharmakon
Contact

[Sacred Bones; 2017]

Rating: 4/5

Pitchfork 79

Through a decade of performing and recording as Pharmakon, Margaret Chardiet has made music that heaves, throbs, and decays. Harnessing the drilling power of electronics and the elasticity of her screams, she’s concocted visceral noise in New York since she was a teenager—first on small-run tapes and CD-Rs, then on more widely-available albums for her hometown label Sacred Bones. As her profile has grown, her sound has remained physical, the aural equivalent of organs pumping life into a body while nature takes a toll on its flesh. The physicality of each Pharmakon album emerges in Chardiet’s choices of cover art. Her 2013 LP Abandon showed maggots swarming on her lap, suggesting a theme of bodily decomposition. For 2014’s Bestial Burden—influenced by an illness that required emergency surgery—she placed animal organs on her chest and torso, as if her own innards had broken through her skin.

On the cover of the third Pharmakon full-length, Contact, Chardiet is no longer alone. A mesh of greasy fingers cover her face, her hair tangled in between them like a spiderweb catching flies. Perhaps Contact, then, is about reaching out and connecting with others. Alongside the heavier, more claustrophobic Bestial Burden, this new collection sounds spacious. Chardiet has opened her psychic soundscapes to give the outside world more room to enter. And that’s a well-timed goal, given how current political strife has pushed people to work together rather than turn inward.

In press materials, Chardiet says Contact is about “when our mind uses the body in order to transcend or escape it.” (Or, as she recently expanded, it’s “about stepping outside your experiences as a human and looking at humanity in an objective way.”) The ultimate objective, she writes, is “Empathy! EMPATHY, NOW!” Achieving that isn’t easy. The music on Contact is stressful and tense, rife with conflicts that aren’t always resolved. At one point, Chardiet even seems ready to admit defeat, singing that “Despite all our scrambling rejections/We cannot transcend all of our instincts/Just animals, lost in a confused dream.” But she never gives up. Each track can be heard as a violent scuffle between mind and body, and Chardiet compellingly mines that primal contest for drama and catharsis. The music hammers with industrial heft, vibrates with nervous pulse, and envelops with tactile atmosphere. Even when her songs achieve moments of transcendence, they still strike you directly in the gut.

Contact benefits from Chardiet’s agile voice, which feels more prominent than ever. Her howls and screeches are central to four of the album’s six tracks, naturally humanizing the music while standing strong inside the electronic clatter. On “Nakedness of Need,” ominous noise is shifted by her blasting shrieks, while during “Transmission” her screams bounce around the din like wolves surrounding prey. That song’s lyric comprises just five lines, framing communication as paramount: “I had a conversation/It lasted nearly an hour/Held no words/And carried the weight/Of the state of things so held.”

Chardiet’s sounds are in a constant tug of war on Contact, and that clash seems to be the point. Just as there’s often more to learn from a journey than its destination, for Pharmakon the battle outweighs the result. Perhaps that’s why Contact’s closer, “No Natural Order,” actually resembles a battlefield. Crashes and pounds rattle while Chardiet peals out angry breaths, undaunted by the sonic assault. In the end, her chants could pass for political slogans—“No divine law, escape!/No positive law, revolt!/No natural law pertains:/Only empathy, untamed”—and it sounds like a victory.