Pharmakon

Pharmakon is the solo project of Margaret Chardiet, an interdisciplinary sound artist born and based in New York City. Pharmakon as a project exists and evolves in true protean form, developing alongside and within Margaret’s personal experience and auto-didactic philosophies. Her work as a whole is a forced self-possession, using electronic synthesis as a tool to transfer this self-possession physiologically and intra-spatially into the bodies of their audience. Pharmakon’s music has a deep-seated possession to urge listeners to feel uncomfortable, confrontational, transcend beyond their physical bodies. Abandon is Margaret’s first full album, spearheading her industrial noise project. Bestial Burden is a harrowing collection of deeply personal industrial noise tracks, each one brimming with struggle and weighted with the intensity of Chardiet’s internal conflict during her recovery from a medical emergency. Contact is about the moments when our mind can come outside of and transcend our bodies. Devour explores new sonic territory, with denser electronics, groovier hooks, and moments of her most unhinged vocal deliveries. Pharmakon’s newest studio album, Maggot Mass, is out now on Sacred Bones. Full of grimy, industrial noise and wrathful vocals with ecocentric lyricism denouncing our capitalistic society and its greed, violence, and lack of compassion for human and non-human life, drawing links between the crises of environment and humanitarian disasters.