Pharmakon
Maggot Mass
Sacred Bones Records
If ever proof were needed that art imitates life then it can be found in the solo project of
experimental artist Margaret Chardiet. Drawing heavily upon industrial and noise rock influences
Pharmakon’s latest album, Maggot Mass, is a terrifying treatise on humanity and our disconnect
from the natural world. It’s a dysfunctional, unequal relationship that finds the planet in a perilous
position and as such this is a maladjusted, unsettling record. In Maggot Mass we have an album
that seethes and pulsates, a swarming stack of sound that perfectly replicates a world that’s in
its death throes. Channelling the Swans at their most destructive, this is a kind of uneasy
listening; this isn’t the type of record to be played as background music, no matter what activity
you are undertaking, once Maggot Mass pours from the speakers, it has the power to stop you
in your tracks. It’s an album of five cuts that grows from humble beginnings, taking on bulk as it
progresses, all the while shapeshifting until we reach disconcerting closer ‘Oiled Animals’, such
is the all-encompassing nature of this album that the silence which follows is a positively
deafening…just like the quietude that’ll follow if we don’t respect planet Earth.
Review by Peter Dennis