On her fifth album, Maggot Mass, power electronics vet Pharmakon made a bold decision “to dabble into ‘music’ instead of strictly ‘noise’” for a visceral album about death, specifically about what happens to our bodies when we die in our current society, and the way “humans have devoured and disrupted our environment.” As Andrew wrote in this week’s Notable Releases review, “The new approach brings several new layers to Pharmakon, and she pulls it off without disappointing anyone hoping for more abrasive, unsettling music. Across five songs, two of which are around nine/ten minutes long, she crafts an apocalyptic nightmare inspired by the real-life hellscape that humans have created for ourselves. The ever-so-slightly more structured, melodic approach mixed with the greater clarity of Margaret’s pained, bloodthirsty screams makes this some of her most emotionally cathartic work yet.” You can listen to Maggot Mass below.
For more on the album, Pharmakon was nice enough to break down — decompose, if you will — the whole thing track by track and like Maggot Mass itself, it is a fascinating, wild, and eye-opening read. Check that below.
Pharmakon: Maggot Mass Track By Track
1.) Wither And Warp
The lyrics for this song began with a euphoric and vividly hallucinatory dream. In it, “I” did not exist, simply was. Without memory, identity, or ego. Suspended outside of time – no before/after, arc, or story – only present moment. Oblivion. Without true thought, merely sensations that felt as comforting as they were unfamiliar: I sensed the prickled growing pains of an extending root, and the tingle of minerals soaking through it. I heard a chattering flow of information pass through me, all chemical communication. I observed the movement of the grasses surrounding me through vibration and an unseen knowing. A vague awareness collected slowly, of being the moss that cushioned a stone. I existed as a single link in the daisy-chain of life, and I belonged. I was useful. Enraptured in the beauty of existence as a plant, a producer who takes only sun, air, and water to reciprocate multitudes in return.
In this dream, I my ”self” was dead. I had passed away into the earth, becoming part of it, or many parts of it – through the divine transfiguration of decay. And I was more content in this mode of being than I ever was with life as a human. A short-lived peace with death. This dream-logic hinged upon the hope that when we die, the body merely breaks down back into the energy that was trapped inside its’ matter. And whatever bacteria, nematodes, flesh-fly larvae, fungi, and carrion-eaters might devour “you” will surely take “you” into “them,” rendering your death back into the folds of life.
I’m not a religious person, and I believe that when we die, our consciousness, memories, identity, ego, id… all that comprises our “selves” dies with us, never to be resurrected again, except until the final passing thought from the last person to remember us. This is undeniably sad and frightening, and has preoccupied me since childhood. The only solace I have ever gleaned through the scope of this belief is in the first law of thermodynamics — energy is not created or destroyed, merely transferred…the sum energy of the universe being zero. Not reincarnation, but redistribution. This idea brought an added comfort as a person born with a womb that will never bear children… it alleviated a guilt that societal pressure creates, by proposing a form of birth through death (“ a bearing without labor”). I will make a good mother to all the life that feeds off my rot. I will become the dust from which life begins and to which it returns.
This song represents the ecstasy of that dream… joy in (a lack of) existence, the self scattered throughout many forms of being. It is a bittersweet celebration of Death, written at a time when it surrounded and saturated my life so oppressively.
How sweet the vision of a death without waste. But as always, we must awaken from such sweet dreams…
2.) Methanal Doll
This song represents the violent and sobering awakening from that suspended state. I awoke with a tugging mist of joy in my eyes that quickly turned to the bitter and salty tears of disappointment, as the room around me came into focus. I looked down to see my flesh and remembered that “I” was… not the moss on a stone, or the worm in the dirt or the pollen in the wind. I am Margaret, not maggot. As the spell wore off, I tried to grasp onto the sense of peace I felt within the dream. I wanted to reassure myself that I could die with dignity and purpose, not to be wasted. That I could return to the dirt, soaking it into abundance. So I began to research… the highly concentrated area of organically rich soil which is left behind as a body rots is called a “Cadaver Decomposition Island.” The average human body produces 32g nitrogen, 10g phosphorus, 4g potassium, and 1g magnesium per kilogram of dry body mass. On this island oasis, the nematodes and worms become more abundant, as do an increasingly diverse selection of plant life. The stage of this miraculous transfiguration can be measured by the “Maggot Mass” (mostly those of the nascent Flesh-flies and Blow-flies). How wonderfully comforting!
But this only happens, I learned, during a so-called “green burial” – meaning without embalming, without concrete vault or casket, without cremation, at an ideal depth of about 3.5 feet, where all the critters that need to feed can access you… the way of chaotic creation.
But this is not the experience I’ve had of burial rites at all. I can close my eyes and see the waxen faces of fallen friends’ enbalmed husks in their open caskets, like lifeless dolls. I can feel the dust of loved ones, so light in the hand that holds their ashes in a plastic bag inside of a cardboard box. Death here and now is a business, and a product. And just like all big business in America, it’s a polluting one. We seep methanal (formaldehyde) into the dirt, corrupting the groundwater with our chemical corpses. We contaminate the air with plumes of toxins as we cremate. Even in death, we find a way to injure the earth. How might it be possible to opt out of such a burial? Can I simply write it into my will? “bury me 3.5 ft deep where the detritivores can reach, place a palmful of seeds in my mouth, water me well, watch them sprout”? This is when I discovered “Green Burials” are illegal in NY State*, with the only exception being if you “own” the land you are buried in.
Of course the clutches of capitalism reach for us, even beyond the grave. Those with means are preserved like monuments. But if you’re poor and live in the filthy concrete, steel and glass of artifice “you will burn, down to ash, in a city morgue, to a plastic bag.” The seeming inevitability of influence that class bears over our lives follows us even into death. “From Death and Dollar, none escape”. Land is to be owned and your body belongs to the State. The stark reality of death in America is that our dust does not return to dust. We deprive the universe of the energy we took from it. We hoard it inside our toxic graves of chemical sludge, all pickled and carved into stone. In our attempt to preserve our bodies that we may live eternally, we remove ourselves from the very chain of life and death that all else on earth adheres to. We lock ourselves away from the earth’s cold embrace. And what might be the consequence of this deprivation? If the energy we inherit remains forever trapped in our lumps of matter, stolen away from the wider universe, are we incrementally draining and wasting all the available force of life?
3.) Buyer’s Remorse
A GOOD CONSCIENCE IS A LUXURY ITEM IN A WORLD AS SICK AS THIS.
This song is about companies and governments who have created, perpetuated, and covered up (without cleaning up) the environmental-humanitarian polycrisis, yet attempt to convince us that the only way out of the mess they’ve made is through our wallets. They say the onus lies with the CONSUMER – that with the many options companies present us with, we can make choices that are environmentally “friendly,” humane, equitable. Of course we can and should do our best to mitigate our personal impact. But for the most part, it cannot happen in any meaningful way through simply purchasing products. Consumer’s choice and greenwashing are a distracting lure dangled by the very worst of environmental abusers themselves, an illusion of progress through consumption.
We complain of the high prices, while willfully ignoring that the true cost of our comfort and privilege is death. “We can’t pay the price with the money that we make. Our debt is due in death, not dollar.”
We “spread awareness” about the crisis in the rainforest using phones whose batteries are made of cobalt mined by slaves in Congo. We pay a premium to pump eco-friendly gas made of corn whose mono-crop farming scours the land and starves the hands that tend it. This conundrum lies at the heart of the meaning of the word Pharmakon. The fallacy of duality ignores the spectrum and the many possible worlds in between. Consumerism cannot save us from our emptiness. The damage these systems have done to our relationship with our environment, with each other, and with ourselves as a whole, cannot be repaired through money. The price we pay is a not a loss of money, but a loss of diversity to life on the planet, and the degradation and death of the people who are trampled just to serve our needs. “Coddle me, comfort me, at my convenience, at the cost of every living thing.”
If earth’s a single CELL in the body of god, then god is dead as every thing we buy and SELL.
4.) Splendid Isolation
For every injury we inflict upon our environment and its’ inhabitants, it amazingly responds by evolving, respawning, regenerating, healing itself and learning to adapt. Yet for all that we take from it, and for all it gives us despite our greed, we mostly offer nothing in return. We can’t see the connection between the pain we inflict and our own afflictions. We see ourselves as separate from our environment. We believe that we can control it, organize it to our will, and manipulate it to our needs. There’s us and our intelligence and our culture – and then there’s “the natural world” that we seek to set ourselves apart from. We imagine we are somehow exempt from the rules and systems that govern all other life on Earth, and create our own set of rules which serve us alone. This self-imposed Species Loneliness creates a deep disconnect and isolation. As we hurl ourselves further and further away into our sequestered alienation, we teeter on the brink of extinction for our own species and threaten to take down all that we touch along with us. “cold stillness as the bottom drops beneath us” imagines us falling in a cold void, like the dark matter of outer space, as we drift further and further. “Distant from the loving scent of humus.” (When we smell that rich life-source alchemized from rot and decay, the hormone Oxytocin is released by our brains…the very bonding chemical that floods our receptors after we have sex with a lover, or as a child is held in their parents’ arms). We are so far from this connection to dirt and death and by extension to life. The specter of unknown tyranny which clutches us away from that embrace stares back at us in the mirror. We are complicit in our comfort.
5.) Oiled Animals
This is the first song I wrote for the album, and thematically encompasses all of the previously outlined ideas. Disgust with our dysfunctional relationship to our environment and the rest of life on earth. The loneliness of that broken bond. Recognizing personal and institutional culpability. The sharp ache of yearning for other possible ways of being, a life and death without waste, and in service to the existence of existence. An idealized vision of human oblivion, and an envy for the dignity of plants. We know of the forever chemicals in our water, the plastic in our blood, and still, even in our selfishness, we dig ourselves a deeper and deeper grave toward extinction, while taking down so many along with us on our descent.
If Earth is a mother, then humans are the narcissistic and petulant child who drives her to the brink of infanticide.
*Update: Quite recently, since these lyrics were written, NY has become the 6th state in the US to legalize “human composting”. Though it is a long way from being available or affordable here, especially in the city. At the moment, it can only be done through a few specific and approved companies, (not legal for your loved ones to DIY), and so far only a couple companies exist out West, who charge upwards of $8,500 for the service- which, along with transportation of the body there and back, makes it about as expensive as “traditional” burial, and inaccessible as ever for the time being. Regulations regarding the use and placement of that compost are still being hammered out.
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Pharmakon is on tour now in Europe with North American dates starting November 2 at TV Eye in Queens, which is a record release show with Matriarch and Trace Amount. After that she’ll be on the road with Uniform and True Body. All dates are below.
PHARMAKON – 2024 TOUR DATES
9/30 – Innsbruck, AT @ PMK
10/1 – Zurich, CH @ Dynamo
10/2 – Frankfurt, DE @ WW2 Bunker
10/3 – Hamburg, DE @ Hafenklang
10/5 – Uppsala, SE @ Otherworldly Festival
10/6 – Oslo, SE @ Vaterland
10/7 – Jonkoping, SE @ The Hush Hush Club
10/8 – Gothenburg, SE @ Oceanen
10/9 – Copenhagen, DK @ Loppen
10/11 – Nijmegen, NL @ Soulcrusher
10/12 – Brussels, BE @ Magasin 4
10/13 – London, UK @ Underworld
10/15 – Dunkirk, FR @ 4Ecluses
10/17 – Berlin, DE @ Cassiopeia
10/18 – Poznań, PL @ Pawilion
10/19 – Lodz, PL @ DOM
10/20 – Prague, CZ @ Bike Jesus
10/21 – Brno, CZ @ Kabinet Muz
10/22 – Budapest, HU @ Instant
10/23 – Zagreb, HR @Mochvara
10/25 – Ljubljana, SL @ Gromka
10/26 – Bologna, IT @ Improved Sequence II Festival
11/2 – Brooklyn, NY @ TV EYE (RECORD RELEASE SHOW)
12/3 – Washington, DC @ DC9 *
12/4 – Philadelphia, PA @ Johnny Brenda’s *
12/5 – Boston, MA @ The Armory *
12/6 – Montréal, QC @ Cabaret Foufounes *
12/7 – Toronto, ON @ Monarch Tavern *
12/8 – Detroit, MI @ Small’s *
12/10 – Chicago, IL @ Empty Bottle *
12//11 – Columbus, OH @ Ace of Cups *
12/13 – Richmond, VA @ The Warehouse *
12/14 – Bethlehem, PA @ National Sokols *
* = w/Uniform + True Body