Photo by Zayn

“As rotting matter / I will make / A good mother / Wet nurse to carrion feeders / Suckling from my wither and warp,” Margaret Chardiet’s voice throbs and gristles in the opening moments of “WITHER AND WARP”. As the lead single from Maggot Mass, her fifth full-length album endeavor into the bowels of the existentialist pit under the moniker Pharmakon, it’s not exactly the first time we’ve heard the New York City-based noise artist seeing her body as a vessel of decay, but in this lurching decomposition state of the nearly-9-minute-long listen, Chardiet is inviting us all to sit with ourselves and see our limbs as an extension to the natural world’s ecosystem. Roots unfold and plantforms consume us whole once we kill the ego of our own importance on this earth. The ground ultimately takes us back into its soil, and turns everywhere we thought we were into mineral for its own repair.

Pharmakon’s Maggot Mass will be released October 4th on Sacred Bones.