Pharmakon - Contact (Sacred Bones) 2017
8
Our bodies can both repel and console us, leave us trapped in paralysed isolation or allow us to reach out and communicate with other living vessels through movement and being. On 2014’s Bestial Burden, Margaret Chardiet as Pharmakon utilised her own personal trauma during a period of physical breakdown and interventionist surgical procedure. The result was an album which stripped away any predetermined notions of noise as violator or debaser and instead focused on acutely personal and universal themes pertinent to all corporeal consciousness with gruelling yet cathartic results.
Now, Contact aims to move further away from this state of bodily dysfunction and elaborate upon the desire of our minds to transcend increasingly weak flesh and bone. In order to do so, Chardiet structures this piece around the four stages of trance: preparation, onset, climax and resolution. This enables a dramatic structure to Contact, from the screaming portal-openings of “Nakedness of Need” through the white tunnel of nauseous light evoked on “Sentient” and onwards through the elevated somnambulism of “Sleepwalking Form” and ferocious epiphany of “No Natural Order”.
The wretched fear and pain of Bestial Burden is mercifully absent, replaced by the sound of an artist moving on in life with arms and spirit outstretched in search of communion and reciprocated touch.