The divine transfiguration of Pharmakon

The cemetery groundskeeper has locked Margaret Chardiet and I inside by accident, meaning we have to scale a wrought-iron fence covered in sharp spikes. The task is no problem for the industrial powerviolence artist known as Pharmakon, an avid subway surfer who’s spent many a night here, contemplating the fleshy grotesque of the corporeal form. Conversely, I’m a few inches away from multiple puncture wounds that would require a trip to a nearby hospital for an emergency tetanus shot. The vaccine is synthesized with methanal, the same chemical used in the embalming process which we’d just spent two hours deriding in relation to Chardiet’s latest album, Maggot Mass. In retrospect, I can’t help but feel as if the bodies beneath our feet didn’t appreciate being used as symbols of human selfishness and capitalistic consumption while they turn into toxic waste with the help of greedy technocrats and pharmaceutical execs.

Death and decay have always been at the forefront of Chardiet’s mind, something she’s made exceedingly clear over the past 17 years as Pharmakon. Similar to her other releases, Maggot Mass is part of a life-long wrestling match that pits a mind bound by society against the powerful urges of the physical body. With its thorny textures and gnashing distortion, Chardiet’s work is ruled by confrontation, destructive agony, and feral rage, expressed from her own corporeal form through blood-curdling screams and animalistic howls. But Maggot Mass is also her most accessible work to date, with its rhyming lyrics and more traditional arrangements to connect with a broader audience. Per Chardiet, the project is a reflection of “the dysfunctional relationship humans have developed with our environment and the rest of life on earth,” and how we’re all affected by “the technological isolation of our species from the rest of the world.”

As we sit on the mossy steps of a weatherbeaten mausoleum, Chardiet expounds on the idea. “[We] impose our will by manipulating the world around us to suit our needs,” she says. These disruptions to nature, she argues, “are actually very self-destructive,” as we’ve become blind to “what these manipulations and interventions are actually doing to our landscape and our own ability to survive.”

Maggot Mass uses modernized death rituals as an example of how we continue to “separate human life from the rest of life on Earth,” she says — how we artificially prolong our lives with synthesized drugs; mindlessly consume sweatshop-made garbage; and pay morticians to turn us into “methanal dolls,” our bodies injected with toxins and placed in a tiny box so detritivores like maggots, nematodes, and fungi cannot return your body to the earth.

From the festering dirge that is “Methanal Doll” to the percussive assault powering “Splendid Isolation,” her productions are “meant to induce a trance” grounded in natural bodily instinct. It's to show how far we’ve strayed from our original purpose on this earth for microplastic junk and our own egos, unable to even give back to the soil that bore us by allowing our flesh to just decompose into hope for new life.

Maggot Mass started with a dream, where Chardiet was dead and every aspect of her “self” had ceased to exist.

“Without memory, identity, or ego. Suspended outside of time — no before/after, arc, or story — only [the] present moment. Oblivion,” she wrote in a press statement about the opening track “Wither and Warp.” While non-sentient, she felt vague sensory bliss about being “a single link in the daisy-chain of life,” where she was “useful” through “the divine transfiguration of decay.”

“I was more content in this mode of being than I ever was with life as a human,” her statement continued. “This is dream-logic hinged upon the hope that when we die, the body merely breaks down back into the energy that was trapped inside its’ [sic] matter. And whatever bacteria, nematodes, flesh-fly larvae, fungi, and carrion-eaters might devour ‘you’ will surely take ‘you’ into ‘them,’ rendering your death back into the folds of life.”

When she sings about our “debt” being due on “Methanal Doll,” you can hear the despair and dismay in her voice, strong enough to eclipse the burdensome textures of the brutal production. Compared to “the decomposers that take our matter and turn it into nutrients that go back to the soil,” she says, humans are “useless” as our egos refuse to let our precious bodies rot.

Chardiet calls the detritivores process of “literally taking death and transforming it into life through redistribution” one part of a “same-class society.” For many, maggots are considered “the lowest form of life” (though Chardiet prefers to use terms like “underdog,” “overlooked,” and “the downtrodden”). She sees the maggot also representing other humans with less money and resources. She talks of the corpses of the poor that are thrown into a city-owned incinerator, the life of a Congolese child being worth less than the cobalt powering your computer, and how the monied and powerful believe they have “primacy over everything around us, even over other humans.”

It’s a selfishness that Chardiet says was on full display during the COVID-19 pandemic, with its disproportionate impact on marginalized communities, the government having to pay Big Pharma for a vaccine, and health insurance companies thriving as policyholders suffered and the uninsured drowned in debt. Where we should’ve been seeing equitable care for others, Chardiet only saw hospital hallways filled with gurneys and biomedical and tech industries rake in billions of dollars, which caused her to spiral into a five-year depressive spell. Throughout the experience, she could only feel a profound sense of grief and moral confusion, torn by her desire to make music from the isolation of her room while “millions of people were dying.”

“I was deeply questioning what the purpose of being an artist was,” she says. “But I also thought, why live if not [to make art]? For me, the process of making this record was kind of reiterating, ‘Yeah, that's who I am, this is why, and it isn't fucking important, because I'm not changing the world or anything like that.’”

Chardiet says her purpose as an artist is to engage in collective action with her community and the like-minded people around her who make her feel like “there's something to be said for changing the culture and the way that we talk about these things, even if it’s a drop in the bucket.”

She adds, “And it's worth shedding that fucking tear.”

In his 1968 essay “Plato’s Pharmacy,” philosopher Jacques Derrida wrote that the ancient Greek thinker using the word “pharmakon” as “drug” denotes that it is both “medicine and/or poison.” More recently, philosopher Bernard Stiegler has argued to expand the application of “pharmakon” to encompass technological and pharmacological advances. As our world becomes increasingly dependent on both, Stiegler writes that tech can be helpful and harmful depending on your perception: It can be good for communication and entertainment, but has also directly contributed to shorter attention spans in children and unchecked consumerism. Others have since applied Stieglerian thinking to these industries’ negative impact on the environment and humanity, arguing that while advances in technologies like smart sensors or cloud computing provide a more comfortable user experience, it’s through “exploiting labor, extracting resources and destroying ecosphere,” per media theorist Jakko Kemper.

These recent philosophical arguments are so perfectly aligned with the message of Maggot Mass it makes you question whether the record says something about Chardiet’s overall identity as Pharmakon. Whether it was clairvoyance or pure coincidence, the 34-year-old chose her stage name when she was 17, completely unaware she would be undergoing a meaningful regenesis another 17 years later. And while the conceptual content remains similar, after spending the past five years wondering “what is industrial music and the purpose of this project,” her subsequent sonic switch-up on Maggot Mass feels fated. Akin to natural law, there was a death, transformation and a birth into something new: a project that’s direct and outwardly confrontational during a time when that’s exactly what’s required.

“Personally, the entire thing is this ‘coming back to the basics’ moment for me, where it's me being more obvious. Like, this is exactly what I'm talking about and who I'm talking to,” Chardiet explains. “For me, there always has been a sense of desperation and urgency, but especially now.”