Pharmakon: I am not a hysterical woman flailing about to exorcise inner demons.
Pharmakon: "I am not a 'hysterical' woman flailing about to exorcise inner demons." Sacred Bones Records

Pharmakon (aka New York’s Margaret Chardiet) thrust herself into the underground-music limelight right out of the gate in 2013 with her debut album, Abandon, on Sacred Bones Records. For a noise opus, it exhibited a rare command of dynamics and drama. Its opening track, “Milkweed/It Hangs Heavy,” begins with a shattering scream (think Diamanda Galás gone death metal), which is then transmuted into its foundational drone. Over that ensue whip cracks, ominous rumbles, traumatized mumbles, and a muted heart beat keeping tense rhythm. Pharmakon conjures a general air of disturbance that’s all the more powerful for its relative restraint compared to most output in the noise genre. This piece sets the tone for Pharmakon’s brief career to date, which includes 2014’s Bestial Burden, an agonizing audio diary of Chardiet's ordeal with a medical emergency.

Like the fiction of horror author Thomas Ligotti, Pharmakon’s music chills marrow as much by what’s left out of the frame as what’s included. Over just two albums and a handful of memorable live performances, she has proven herself to be the natural successor to Throbbing Gristle and John Wiese’s artful noise throne. (By the way, Pharmakon’s “Crawling on Bruised Knees” is the most powerful tribute to the former’s “Discipline” you will ever hear.)

Below, I interview Pharmakon about her noise culture, her confrontational live shows, beauty, and more. She plays Decibel Festival’s MOTOR Showcase at Crocodile Friday September 25.

The Stranger: At this late date, noise music has been somewhat domesticated and enshrined in underground culture. It now takes a lot to move audiences, which have become blasé toward many strains of extreme music. Given all of this, is it still your intention to shock or provoke extraordinary reactions from spectators/listeners with your performances?
My intention is not to shock, but to provoke. I see a huge gap between these two ideas. A shock is surface level—a momentary shallow response to something novel which fades away. To provoke suggests that it stirs something up inside of the person experiencing. It stirs up latent thoughts and emotions that needed only prodding to continue fomenting and developing on their own. The only thing I want from an audience is for them to react in whatever way feels natural. To be open to what is being stirred inside of them, and honest to it.

Many musicians talk about their art as being therapeutic and/or cathartic, but yours genuinely seems to serve those purposes for you—as well as doing the same for certain listeners. Is making music a physical and mental compulsion, and without this outlet you'd lose your grip on sanity (however you want to define that)?
This is always a difficult question, because, yes, the music, lyrics, images, and concepts that I mold always start from a very personal impetus. But the idea is to develop those cathartic impulses by understanding the personal in a larger context, in an empathetic and conceptual way, transforming them into a vessel for other people to be involved in, to invoke that same catharsis in others. However, it is easy for people to interpret this as some sort of exorcism, which basically implies a hysterical woman. Women using extreme emotion in art have often been lumped into this category—the crazies! I am not a child having a fit, or a “hysterical” woman flailing about to exorcise inner demons. Rather, those demons serve as a catalyst for further conceptual inquiry, for connection with older and bigger ideas than my own experience. I would go crazy without being able to pursue my art and ideas and explore them to their outer limits, to experiment with the line between personal and universal.

When you played Kremwerk in Seattle earlier this year, you roamed into the crowd during your set. What's the rationale behind that move?
I want to break down the rigid roles of audience and performer, in the sense that I do not consider what I do a spectacle. I am not a trained monkey on a pedestal for people to clap at. I want a genuine connection with the other human beings in the room around me. I want to say the lyrics TO them, not AT them. Especially when half of the time, they may not be able to understand what I’m saying, I want to show them through my bodily movements, eye contact, make them feel what I am saying instead of hear. I want to feed off of the energy in the room that was created by an exchange between myself and everyone in the room.

How does your throat feel after a show or recording session?
Torn apart and abused.

What is beautiful to you, musically and otherwise?
Music that you cannot break apart—when it strikes you straight in the gut, and its power cannot be dissected to a riff or a voice or a lyric but something intangible and esoteric. The feeling of being in a trance. Anyone who is caught up in a moment—like when someone is so passionate about what they’re discussing that they get a little red in the face, and their gesticulations become more and more animated. Something naked and peeled of artifice, but equally someone who has bent the rules of nature and made themselves in an image of their own creation.