Pharmakon: "Bestial Burden"

Sometimes the scariest music is also the simplest. Unadorned minimalism can be like creepy silence in a horror film, pregnant with the possibility that something lurks around the corner, ready to pounce at any moment. That’s how the title track from Pharmakon’s excellent album  Bestial Burden begins, with a small, static pulse that seems to teeter on the edge of explosion. Margaret Chardiet’s tactic here is pretty tried and true; it reminds me of  Wolf Eyes’ knack for starting low and sinister before detonating into mechanical beats and industrial howls. 

In the case of “Bestial Burden”, though, the beats never come. In fact, the music hardly changes throughout the track’s seven minutes. Instead, Chardiet builds momentum through vocal manipulations: talking, screaming, growling, and even dipping into the horror-noise cliché of maniacal laughter. But it’s all made gut-level effective by the way she blends, cuts, and sutures her overlapping voices, gradually turning literal meaning into a overwhelming sonic force. In that sense, she evokes another noise stalwart: Prurient, whose early work see-sawed tension and release through vocal calisthenics. But these are just reference points. On “Bestial Burden” and the rest of the album that takes its name, Chardiet proves she can make any sound her own.

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