Margaret Chardiet’s noise project Pharmakon has put out two fantastic albums so far — 2013’s Abandon and 2014’s Bestial Burden — and she’s about to follow those up with a third. Chardiet has just announced that the next Pharmakon album, which is called Contact, will be out at the end of March, and lead single “Transmission” is exactly the kind of abrasive foreboding churn that we’ve come to expect from the project. Chardiet provided the following statement about the album:

Man is a rabid dog, straining at its leash of mortality with bared teeth. Snarling and clawing over each other, we aim to reach a higher ground to claim as our own. There are those who will attempt to exert power over others to attain it. They will sniff you out; lay claim over your body, your actions, your thoughts, your time. (How starkly human, so desperate for the sense of vantage over all versions of its own reflection!) Their aims are empty, because their power is a construct they created and gave back to themselves. They too are small and inconsequential. All people are only human and humans are only animals. The nature of existence and our sentience is chance, owing nothing to anything. Humankind is of no special significance to the universe. (Despite all our scrambling rejections, we cannot transcend all of our instincts — just animals, lost in a confused dream, where mankind is real and at the center of everything). We are each nothing but a single, short-lived cell in a vast organism which itself will one day die. If we accept that the only true claim sentience gives us is our tiny sliver of time, it opens us to revel in it, to make CONTACT. When we pick up on transmissions between the private rooms inside our heads and the flesh of our vessels, when thought escapes its isolation and is seen, heard and understood. When our mind uses the body in order to transcend and escape it!

The moments of connection/communion/CONTACT, when the veil is for a brief but glorious moment lifted, and we are free. Empathy! EMPATHY, NOW!

Listen to “Transmission” below.

Tracklist:
01 “Nakedness Of Need”
02 “Sentient”
03 “Transmission”
04 “Sleepwalking Form”
05 “Somatic”
06 “No Natural Order”

Tour Dates:
01/31 Berlin, DE @ CTM Fest – Berghain
04/02 The Hague, NL @ Rewire Festival
04/25 London, UK @ Electrowerkz (Record Release Show)
05/21 Durham, NC @ Moog Fest

Contact is out 3/31 via Sacred Bones.