We last heard from Margaret Chardiet’s project Pharmakon in 2019 with her fourth album Devour. Today, the New York noise musician is back with the announcement of its follow-up, Maggot Mass, out this fall. The scorching lead single “WITHER AND WARP” is out now.

“Maggot Mass is bred out of a disgust for the dysfunctional relationship that humans have developed with our environment and the rest of life on earth,” Chardiet explained. She continued:

It touches on the wounds of loneliness inflicted by that broken bond, and asks us to face the mirror in acknowledgement of our personal and systemic culpability.

What peace can be made with privilege, when we understand the true cost of our comfort is death and not dollar? What peace can be made with death when we impose on it the same bankrupt pecking order in which we organize our lives? To what extent is life worth living in the solitude of this self-imposed species loneliness?

Human beings measure our worth only in relation to our selves, on the scale of an endless and exponential accumulation of things. This is what we call wealth. This is what we deem to be power. We calculate our meaning in money, assets and objects. Influence, superiority, and control. Western heritage dictates a hierarchy of beings, and places ourselves at the very apex of evolution. We think of ourselves as somehow separate from the rest of the “natural world,” its’ primary narrators, and at the center of every orbit. This delusion transforms bodies into objects, land into property, and people into expendable tools.

If our value were determined instead by the richness of our reciprocation to the very fabric of being, the very existence of existence, our role in the ecosystem of land and of people… then who could say that a human being has more worth than a measly maggot?

A maggot eats death and alchemizes it back into life: breaking down matter and recycling its’ nutrients. One gift begets another. It soon undergoes its’ miraculous transfiguration into a fly, and continues on to pollinate 70% of plants: midwives and messengers to the flora of Earth. And we? We pollute instead of pollinate. A select few profit from scouring, pillaging and staining the dirt at the expense of the many, with net losses to the diversity of life on the planet, and by the degradation and death of those who are trampled just to serve their greed.

In an attempt to reconcile grief and loss on both a personal and global scale, I sought solace by envisioning rebirth through death. I longed to revel in the reciprocation of decay, to celebrate the beauty of regeneration through degeneration. But these dreams were impossible not to wake from, and I had to acknowledge the gaping chasm between those possibilities for communion with the earth and the feasibility of that connection in this reality, under the thumb of our ruling systems. The grip of capital that squeezes dry every facet of our lives and even our deaths.. I imagined one of many possible paths through this chasm. What if our final choice, our last act and lasting legacy was one of giving back what we received from the chaos of creation. If we gave not only our lives but our deaths to the cause of the existence of existence…

Lyrically, in the past I didn’t allow myself to rhyme, use traditional structures of poetry, and avoided pronouns at all costs. So this time I incorporated all of those tropes, and wrote from a more familiar and direct voice to the listener. I also wanted to explore new ways of using my voice besides speaking or screaming, and experimented with new vocalizations balancing strain and hoarseness with melody and cadence.

Compositionally, I never allowed myself to use any traditional song structures, and this time allowed myself to dabble into “music” instead of strictly “noise”. This resulted in “solos” and “bridges” and “verses and choruses” sprinkled throughout the record.

once I slough
off this human skin
I will find my home
and ancestral kin…
in the coffin-birth
of my cadaver’s ecosystem

Hear “WITHER AND WARP” below.

TRACKLIST:
01 “WITHER AND WARP”
02 “METHANAL DOLL”
03 “BUYER’S REMORSE”
04 “SPLENDID ISOLATION”
05 “OILED ANIMALS”

Maggot Mass is out 10/4 on Sacred Bones.