PHARMAKON (US) + I.C.H (CH/UK/AUS)

Backline Presents: 

PHARMAKON 
(Sacred Bones, USA) 

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).

Support: I.C.H (CH/UK/AUS)

An international Zurich-based trio (Brazil / UK / Australia) operating at the intersection of noise, EBM, and spoken word. Abrasive vocals and shouted fragments confront war, resistance, and alienation. Performances are volatile and physical, driven by free-flowing improvised movement from the lead vocalist, unstable textures, and strobe-lit intensity