PHARMAKON - Devour

The undoubted merit of musicians like Margaret Chardiet is having introduced noise, harsh, and death industrial sounds to a wider audience, one that had perhaps never before encountered acts like Brighter Death Now, early Ramleh, Atrax Morgue, Genocide Organ, Mz.412 and so on.

Pharmakon, Chardiet's project, carries on in that long tradition with consistently solid work focused on themes of the body, carnality and transcendence. Noise becomes aching flesh while, at the same time, opening a passage toward the beyond, a dark elsewhere lodged in the mind's darkest corners.

If the previous album, “Contact“, was a kind of journey inspired by the four stages of trance (preparation, onset, climax and resolution), the new record, titled “Devour”, is instead a musical reflection on self-destruction through a sort of cannibalism of one's own flesh, as suggested by the title itself and by some of Chardiet's own statements. Whether it's illness and convalescence after a long operation (the central theme of “Bestial Burden“) or the eating disorders evoked from the very cover of her debut album “Abandon“, Chardiet's world is always an extreme, liminal place, where physicality is front and center and pushed to its limits, or at times psychotically denied, but always through brutal performances devoted to the self-martyrdom of the female body.

The album comes out on Sacred Bones, like the artist's other releases, and consists of five tracks, recorded live in a single session with the help of Ben Greenberg, already a member of the explosive industrial-hardcore band Uniform.

Between drone industrial clangor and harsh drift, this is another solid outing for the American musician. A work that perhaps doesn't reach the depth and heft of a Puce Mary, but whose success confirms Margaret Chardiet as one of the best-known and most closely followed artists around, and not just among fans of a certain niche sound.

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22/09/2019