She points out that the environment there amongst so
many other experimental artists (amongst them Yellow Tears &
Haflings) inspired her to keep making increasingly challenging work.
She describes her drive to make noise music as something akin to an
exorcism where she is able to express, her “deep-seated
need/drive/urge/possession to reach other people and make them feel
something (specifically) in uncomfortable/confrontational ways.”
Engineered
by Sean
Ragon of
Cult of Youth at his self-built recording studio Heaven
Street, Abandon is Pharmakon’s first
proper studio album and also her first widely distributed release.
Unlike other experimental projects, Pharmakon does
not improvise when performing or recording. She is concise and exact;
each song/movement is linear with a clear trajectory. Perhaps more
than any other style of music, noise is a genre almost exclusively
dominated by male performers.
Spin Magazine is apt to point out that her,
“perfectionism might explain why her recordings are few and far
between - a rarity in a scene where noise bros are want to puke out
hour after endless hour of stoned basement jams into a limitless
stream of limited-edition tapes. Her music may be as cuddly as a
trepanning drill, but it’s also just as precise: She glowers in
measured silence as often as she shrieks, and every serrated tone
cuts straight to the bone, a carefully calibrated interplay between
frequency and resistance.”
The
songs on Abandon were
all written and recorded during a turbulent three month time period
in which several fundamental life changes forced Chardiet to begin
living in a completely new way and in a new space. She describes the
lyrical themes of this album as being about, “Loss. Losing
everything. Relinquishing control. Complete psychic abandon. Blind
leaps of faith into the fire, walking out unscathed. Crawling out of
the pit.”
