Decibel Festival

Margaret Chardiet was born and raised in New York City. She 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. Several projects emerged from the Red Light home/venue during the four years Chardiet lived there including Yellow Tears, and Halflings amongst others. She points out that the environment there amongst so many other experimental artists inspired her to keep pushing herself and making increasingly challenging work. 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 at his self-built recording studio Heaven Street, Abandon is Pharmakon’s 1st 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. Perhaps more than any other style of music, noise is a genre almost exclusively dominated by male performers.