Pharmakon embraces duality through sound. For 17 years, power-electronics artist Margaret Chardiet has been making bristling, textural chaos under the name Pharmakon—a Greek word that can mean remedy and poison. Deconstructionist philosopher Jacques Derrida introduced the concept “pharmakon” as a container for binaries central to Western logic traditions, like good/bad and internal/external. Chardiet has composed her five studio albums with these tensions in mind, striving for something visceral and organic with her harsh, mechanical noise.
On her latest release, October’s Maggot Mass (Sacred Bones), Chardiet explores natural versus built environments while condemning capitalist greed and human-made catastrophes. “Methanal Doll” looks at the irony of the funeral industry and the many ways our bodies are prevented from decomposing back into the earth from which we sprang. “Buyer’s Remorse” links mass consumption to pollution and labor abuses while underscoring our inability to completely opt out of consumer culture. “Splendid Isolation” positions loneliness as a reaction to an artificial scarcity of affection by describing how technology breeds disconnection.
Maggot Mass is easily Chardiet’s most outward-looking release as well as her most melodic—though the latter is a relative assessment, given the atonal brutality of her output. Many noise artists approach performances of their work intuitively or improvisationally, so that each show provides a loose reimagining of a recorded track, but Chardiet is exacting about her material. Her silences are as measured as her screams, and her performances are remarkably faithful to her recordings—albeit amplified by her full-throttle onstage delivery. Chardiet is coheadlining a tour with Sacred Bones labelmates Uniform, whose latest album, August’s American Standard, is a raw exploration of the battle that vocalist Michael Berdan has fought with bulimia. This Empty Bottle show should be a night to revel most artfully in the punishment of existence.
Pharmakon Uniform and Pharmakon coheadline (with Uniform playing last); True Body open. Tue 12/10, 9 PM, Empty Bottle, 1035 N. Western, $20, 21+