Margaret Chardiet has been making power electronics/death industrial music under the name Pharmakon for five years. As a founding member of the Red Light District collective in Far Rockaway, NY, she has been a figurehead in the underground experimental scene since the age of seventeen. She describes her drive to make noise music as something akin to an exorcism where she is able to express, her “deep-seated need/drive/urge/possession to reach other people and make them FEEL something (specifically) in uncomfortable/confrontational ways.” The project is also an opportunity to exorcise her own demons and examine her own wild thoughts by pushing them outside of her head. Engineered by Sean Ragon of Cult of Youth, Abandon is Pharmakon’s first proper studio album and also her first widely distributed release. Unlike other experimental projects, Pharmakon does not improvise when performing or recording. She is concise and exact and each song/movement is linear with a clear trajectory. Her music may be as cuddly as a trepanning drill, but it’s also just as precise: She glowers in measured silence as often as she shrieks, and every serrated tone cuts straight to the bone, a carefully calibrated interplay between frequency and resistance.