Artist News Releases

Pharmakon announces new album Devour

By Andy Malt | Published on Wednesday 10 July 2019

Pharmakon has announced her latest album ‘Devour’. Set for release next month, the new record, she says, “uses self-cannibalisation as allegory for the self-destructive nature of human”.

This is the fourth album producer Margaret Chardiet has made as Pharmakon, and she changed her process this time, recording live in the studio with engineer Ben Greenberg. The album’s five tracks are the result of two continuous takes, bringing a new intensity to her already oppressively intense sound.

She explains: “In our cells, our minds, our politics and our species, humans are self-destructing. But this behaviour does not happen in a vacuum. It is an instinctive inward response to a world of increasing outward violence, greed and oppression. Turning these wounds toward ourselves can be seen as an attempt at ‘balancing feedback’, within a never-ending positive feedback loop of cause and effect”.

“With this view, the blame is placed not within the individual”, she continues, “but with the world they must contend with, and a society that is designed to fail them – to keep them gnashing and wailing, inflicted with an all-devouring hunger that inevitably turns in on the self. Those that pit them against each other grin from the sidelines, bellies full”.

However, she adds: “Those who see beyond the veil need to obscure the horrid sight by any means necessary, but respite is always brief – nothing can dampen the glare from behind the veil. This album is dedicated to all who were lost to their own demise, all who have been institutionalised; whether in prison, psychiatric facilities, or drug rehabilitation. It is for all those ostracised by and isolated from a totality which chews them up alive in a self-cannibalising caste system”.

So, there you go. The album is out on 30 Aug. From it, this is ‘Self-Regulating System’: