Pharmakon

Margaret Chardiet is an interdisciplinary sound artist born and based in New York City. As a founding member of the Red Light District collective in Far Rockaway, NY, she has been a figurehead in the underground experimental scene since the age of seventeen. Pharmakon as a project, entity, and process 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: a celebration of ferality and viscereality, abandoning a society that has never accepted anything it couldn’t also exploit. Chardiet uses electronic synthesis as a tool to transfer this self-possession physiologically and intra-spatially into the bodies of their audience. Timbre becomes temper, a tameless social contagion or biorhythm.

Pharmakon’s music has a deep-seated possession to urge listeners to feel - feel uncomfortable, confrontational, transcend beyond their physical bodies. Each album contains its own logic and conceptual universe, using the album art, lyrics, sounds, and raw energy and emotion of performance to explore themes through the lens of duality vs spectrum. Abandon and abandonment, the divides and connections between mind and body, and "self" destruction which destroys everything around it. 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. Using the stages of trance as a biorhythm for the album, Pharmakon animates it, and instills the intention of communion into the music. Devour explores new sonic territory, with denser electronics, groovier hooks, and moments of her most unhinged vocal deliveries. 

Margaret's newest record Maggot Mass, released October 4th 2024, is 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.