Pharmakon + Kollaps

Margaret Chardiet was born and raised in New York City. As a founding member of the Red Light District collective in Far Rockaway, New York, she has been a figurehead in the underground experimental scene since the age of seventeen.
„Bestial Burden“ is a thematically intense album based on a major surgery Chardiet had just before she was set to go on her first European tour. It’s the second Pharmakon LP for Sacred Bones Records, following 2013’s critically acclaimed „Abandon“, and it’s a harrowing collection of deeply personal industrial noise tracks, each one brimming with struggle and weighted with the intensity of Chardiet’s internal conflict.

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Following 2015’s debut EP release Heartworm, Melbourne industrialists Kollaps have refined their restless brand of harsh DIY post-industrial noise. Recruiting doom/noise veteran Damian Coward [Heirs, High Tension] to bass/percussion/production in 2016, Wade Black (vocals) and Robin W. Marsh’s (drums, programming) new offering Sibling Lovers intensifies the conflict between the twin energies of confusion and control at the core of Kollaps’ sound. The bands habitually uneasy textures and crude tones are generated with appropriated non-instruments- scrap metal, raw plastics, steel beams. For the band, this isn’t an empty ‘industrial’ gesture, it’s a way to literally use the detritus of postmodern society against itself. Vocals bypass the desk, running directly through amplifiers to create a sense of a raw, untreated voice.
Conceptually, Sibling Lovers follows Heartworm as an exploration of individual sickness as a manifestation of a diseased modern society. For lyricist Wade Black Sibling Lovers is introspective and confessional; images of actual physical sicknesses (cancer, colostomy bags, heart worm) are used to make sense a malignant world of slaughterhouses, incest and alcoholism.