It’s hard not to feel uneasy looking at the cover of Contact, the latest album from artist Margaret Chardiet’s industrial noise project Pharmakon. Dozens of sweaty fingers emerge from every direction, enmeshed with one another. Beneath them lies Chardiet, mouth agape, eyes closed, hair tangled amongst the hands. Disturbing and visceral, it’s a perfect summation of Chardiet’s pummeling sound. On Contact, her third album for Sacred Bones, her discordant electronics and full-throated howls culminate once again into a harsh and uncompromising record.
Fans of Pharmakon’s previous work know that Chardiet does not deal in subtleties. Pharmakon’s first widely released album, Abandon, opened with a chilling scream and the sound of scraping metal. Like Abandon, Contact wastes no time introducing its punishing sound. “Nakedness of Needs” begins with an ominous grinding noise that echoes and repeats itself. Each blast lands with tremendous force, pummeling the listener again and again. Chardiet’s voice lies beneath it all: It enters as a rising moan, then gives way to anguished screaming. Her vocals feel at war with the music, her shrieks piercing through the dense squall of noise.
It’s a telling arrangement: In a press release, Chardiet wrote that the album was about “moments when our mind can come outside of and transcend our bodies.” On Contact, these moments are captured by the constant clash of her voice and instrument. While Pharmakon’s previous album, 2014’s Bestial Burden, focused on the terror of the body betraying the mind. Contact imagines how the mind can transcend the primal body. As the music indicates, it’s a tumultuous and terrifying process.
The album’s closing track “No Natural Order” demonstrates this vision. A bruising nearly seven-minute epic, “Order” calls into question our species’ own purpose and destiny. “The chance nature of existence/ Ours is of no special significance,” she screams, enveloped in pulsing electronics and clattering metal. The synths pick up in speed, whipping the noise into a frenzy. In the second half of the song, Chardiet’s screams and percussion slam together like violent waves. Each one is punctuated with urgent pleas: “No Divine Law, escape!”, she cries out in one line. It’s a brutal meditation on human existence that feels like a punch in the gut.
Instrumental tracks “Sentient” and “Somatic” pull away from the tension, but offer little respite in return. “Sentient,” the least essential track, is an accelerating four-note cycle that leads to nowhere. “Somatic” fares somewhat better — an eerie sound loops over jagged synths before collapsing into complete noise. Like “Somatic,” the song feels inferior to the vocal tracks, mostly serving as a buffer between songs. On an album of just six songs, it is hard not to feel that slighted by comparison.
The appeal of Contact lies in its catharsis. Pharmakon’s music illustrates extreme dichotomies, pitting body and mind against each other in a struggle for dominance. It’s only fitting that the music is just as intense.
