PHARMAKON live

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.

KOLLAPS live

Australian post-industrialists Kollaps are a three piece creating a unique brand of primitive noise “intended for degenerates and outsiders”. The bands’ distinctive primordial tones are created using appropriated waste materials like scrap metal, raw plastics and steel plates combined with blistering percussion, bass and vocals. This is no empty “industrial” gesture, for the band this process of creation facilitates the literal use of postmodern society against itself. Mechanical Christ, the bands’ sophomore release, is a conceptual continuation of its predecessor Sibling Lovers. This release sees Kollaps further their exploration of the inherent societal sickness of our times, one that manifests itself in the debasement of individual morality. Themes of exploitation, vengeance, drug addiction, paranoia and slave labour are part of a dissonant, inverted morality play. Testament to the bands’ evolving conceptual depth are the overarching themes of love, life and death that offer a sense of shared experience in the discomfort of the universal human experience. Known for their violent and nihilistic stage performances, this recording encapsulates with harsher clarity the visceral confrontation that is Kollaps’ live act.

Mechanical Christ was recorded and mixed over a two-month period at Aviary Studios by Mike Deslandes, and mastered by James Plotkin/Plotkinworks. It is a journey into the desperation and lack of resolve that is both the crux of modern social ills and at the very heart of the human condition.

INOU KI ENDO DJ-Set