Pharmakon is back with her first new album in five years: Maggot Mass arrives October 4 via Sacred Bones. Leading the return of Margaret Chardiet’s experimental industrial project is “Wither and Warp,” the album’s nine-minute-long debut single. Give it a listen below.
“The lyrics for this song began with a euphoric and vividly hallucinatory dream. In it, ‘I’ did not exist, simply was,” explained Chardiet. “I had passed away into the earth, becoming part of it, or many parts of it—through the divine transfiguration of decay. And I was more content in this mode of being than I ever was with life as a human. This dream logic hinged upon the hope that when we die, the body merely breaks down back into the energy that was trapped inside its matter.”
Over the course of its five songs, Maggot Mass explores Chardiet’s repulsion for the way humans use and abuse the environment. It’s Pharmakon’s fifth album, following 2019’s Devour.
This autumn, Pharmakon will embark on a European tour timed to the record’s release. She will perform in Austria, London, Berlin, Oslo, Prague, and more cities before ending with a set at Italy’s Improved Sequence II Festival on October 26. Find her complete list of tour dates below.
Read about Pharmakon’s 2013 full-length, Abandon, in “The 33 Best Industrial Albums of All Time.”
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Maggot Mass:
01 Wither and Warp
02 Methanal Doll
03 Buyer’s Remorse
04 Splendid Isolation
05 Oiled Animals
Pharmakon:
09-30 Innsbruck, Austria – p.m.k
10-01 Zurich, Switzerland – Jugendkulturhaus Dynamo
10-02 Frankfurt, Germany – WW2 Bunker
10-03 Hamburg, Germany – Hafenklang
10-05 Uppsala, Sweden – Otherworldly Festival
10-06 Oslo, Norway – Vaterland Bar
10-07 Jönköping, Sweden – The Hush Hush Club
10-08 Gothenburg, Sweden – Kulturhuset Oceanen
10-09 Copenhagen, Denmark – Loppen
10-11 Nijmegen, Netherlands – Soulcrusher
10-12 Anderlecht, Belgium – Magasin 4
10-13 London, England – The Underworld
10-15 Dunkirk, France – Les 4Ecluses
10-17 Berlin, Germany – Cassiopeia
10-18 Poznań, Poland – Pawilion
10-19 Lodz, Poland – DOM
10-20 Prague, Czech Republic – Bike Jesus
10-21 Brno, Czech Republic – Kabinet Múz
10-22 Budapest, Hungary – Instant-Fogas Complex
10-23 Zagreb, Croatia – Močvara
10-25 Ljubljana, Slovenia – Klub Gromka
10-26 Bologna, Italy – Improved Sequence II Festival
