Margaret Chardiet's New York power-electronics project: churning industrial noise and screamed voice turned inward on the body and its betrayals, carried to a wide audience through Sacred Bones and a confrontational live presence.
Pharmakon is the solo power-electronics and noise project of Margaret Chardiet, of New York City, and the Bureau files it at Tier III as a leading contemporary voice in the form at F·07. Active from the late 2000s, with a debut cassette on BloodLust! in 2009 after self-released tapes and CD-Rs, Chardiet had been a figure in the city's underground since her teens.
The project grew out of the Red Light District collective and venue in Far Rockaway, which she co-founded and which housed other experimental acts during the years she lived there. That DIY environment, rather than any label tradition, shaped the work: power electronics and industrial noise built from churning low synthesis, abrasive blasts and Chardiet's own screamed voice, harsh and confrontational yet held together by a hypnotic, rhythmic pull.
Her public profile came through Sacred Bones. Abandon (2013), engineered by Sean Ragon, was her first properly distributed album; Bestial Burden (2014) was written during recovery from a medical emergency and turned the work toward the body and its betrayal; Contact (2017) and Devour (2019) followed. Across them the themes are unusually interior for the genre: the divide between mind and body, isolation, and a self-directed destruction, an inward turn on power electronics' usual outward aggression.
Pharmakon is known above all for performance. Chardiet routinely crosses the boundary between stage and audience, moving into the crowd, treating the set as a kind of exorcism meant to make listeners physically feel discomfort. It is this directness, as much as the records, that carried the form to a larger and younger audience without softening it, and that places the project adjacent to the Hospital Productions orbit this archive documents.
The Bureau files Pharmakon at Artists · Tier III as contemporary power electronics of documentary necessity: a project that took the genre's confrontation inward, onto the body, and proved the form still had new ground in the 2010s, kept here for its place in the living edge of the tradition.