Since the early 2010s, Margaret Chardiet’s work under the moniker Pharmakon has used sound art techniques to cultivate expansive industrial atmospheres. Today, she returns with her fifth studio record, Maggot Mass, due for release on October 4 via long-standing label home Sacred Bones. Arriving after a five year hiatus, it portrays a repulsion towards the toxic relationship humans have created with the environment, about self and each other’s destruction.

Along with the announcement, Chardiet shares single ‘WITHER AND WARP.’ The track came to life after a vivid dream about ego death in which the concept of self disappeared and Chardiet faded into the earth. Opening with the sticky sound of buzzing insects, the nearly nine-minute track manifests as a swamp of nasty drones and dense, cavernous guitars. “As rotting matter / I will make / A good mother / Wet nurse to carrion feeders / Suckling from my wither and warp,” Chardiet snarls in the opening lines. It’s a fitting introduction to an album that confronts our capitalistic society head on.

Speaking on the track, Pharmakon shares: “The lyrics for this song began with a euphoric and vividly hallucinatory dream. In it, “I” did not exist, simply was. Without memory, identity, or ego. Suspended outside of time – only present moment. Oblivion. Without true thought, merely sensations that felt as comforting as they were unfamiliar: I sensed the prickled growing pains of an extending root, and the tingle of minerals soaking through it. I heard a chattering flow of information pass through me, all chemical communication. A vague awareness collected slowly, of being the moss that cushioned a stone. Enraptured in the beauty of existence as a plant, a producer who takes only sun, air, and water to reciprocate multitudes in return.

“In this dream, I my “self” was dead. 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. And all the carrion-eaters who might devour “you” will surely take “you” into “them”, rendering your death back into the folds of life. This song represents the ecstasy of that dream… joy in (a lack of) existence, the self scattered throughout many forms of being. How sweet the vision of a death without waste. But as always, we must awaken from such sweet dreams…”

Maggot Mass:

1. WITHER AND WARP
2. METHANAL DOLL
3. BUYER’S REMORSE
4. SPLENDID ISOLATION
5. OILED ANIMALS