Pharmakon (Sacred Bones, USA), KOLLAPS (Cold Spring Records / AUS)

Margaret Chardiet is an interdisciplinary sound artist born and based in New York City. Raised by underground musicians and artists, Margaret was surrounded by a collective of the city’s impassioned, cultural detritus. Instead of following a path of higher education, she began the experimental project Pharmakon in 2006, at the age of 16. Pharmakon as a project, entity, and process, has evolved and exists in true protean form, developing alongside (or more so within) Margaret’s personal experience and auto-didactic philosophies. Her work as a whole is a forced self-possession, a celebration of ferality and viscereality, which performatively abandons a society that has never accepted anything it couldn’t also exploit. Chardiet uses electronic synthesis as a tool to transfer this self-possession physiologically and intra-spatially into the bodies of their audience. Timbre becomes temper. Ferality, a social contagion or biorhythm. Margaret has also played in numerous punk groups that extend out to a greater international D.I.Y. music community, and has composed score and original music for the films Transfiguration (2017), and Sound of Metal (2019).

Until The Day I Die is Kollaps’ third LP for Cold Spring Records. The record, set for release in June 2022, is merciless and visceral assault on the senses and continues the trajectory of the band’s idiosyncratic approach in their creation of sound. Until The Day I Die is an uncompromising force of harsh post-industrial music narrated by overarching themes of condemnation and redemption; violence, romanticism, sexuality, and addiction. Much of the creation and lyrical conceptualisation of the record has been stylised and presented by the use of William S. Burroughs’ cut-up method.

A wide variety of metals and raw materials were used in the creation of the album including metal grates, a rusted hoist, cement cylinders, field recordings, hammering of various decrepit objects, broken amplifiers, an exposed reverb tank, various synthesizers, and the infamous metal coil; a crudely self-constructed artifice that has become iconic in its use across Kollaps’ triptych of releases and lengthy touring history in Europe, Australia and New Zealand.

Until The Day I Die has had a tectonic shift in production methods compared to its predecessors and was entirely written, recorded and mixed internally in a self-constructed studio above a sculpture museum in Lugano, Switzerland.