“To be well adjusted in this system is to be oblivious and unfeeling,” Margaret Chardiet writes in the artist statement for Devour, her fourth album as Pharmakon. “This is for the rest of us, who understand that chaos, madness, pain and even self-destruction are natural and inevitable responses to an unjust and disgusting world of our own making.” Blending the harsh noise of Wolf Eyes and the incantatory menace of Diamanda Galás, Pharmakon’s latest transmission from the sick center of our devastated epoch sounds like a dying brain’s final nightmare. It is the antithesis of easy listening, because we live in the opposite of a kind and just world. We have earned this impossible soundtrack.

by Chris Stamm