Pharmakon on Screaming, Decay, and the Evils of the Art World

This is a free post from Larry Fitzmaurice's Last Donut of the Night newsletter. Paid subscribers get one or two email-only Baker's Dozens every week featuring music I've been listening to and some critical observations around it. Right now I'm offering a holiday sale on monthly subscriptions—50% off the first six months—and you can grab that here.

First newsletter of the new year, glad to have y'all back after a week's hiatus from the free posts (paying subscribers, of course, kept receiving Baker's Dozens throughout the holiday—and if you click that link right above, you can too!)

Now that we're back in action: Right before things started shutting down for the holidays, I had the privilege of talking to the one and only Margaret Chardiet of the excellent noise project Pharmakon. (I wrote about Margaret's 2014 album Bestial Burden for Pitchfork back in the day.) Margaret released a new record last year, Maggot Mass, that continues to extend their vision into hellish new unknowns—and from the sounds of our convo, it sounds like Pharmakon might be taking a very different turn moving forward. Read on:

You just got off tour. How's touring felt to you lately?
It's different. I hadn't been on a long tour like that since 2019. I was gone for a full month and there were a few days off here and there—mostly travel days—but it was pretty much a show every night. Right when the pandemic hit, I was supposed to go on a long European tour, but it all got canceled. I haven't put out a record since then or toured extensively, so it had been a minute. I was nervous about it, even physically—for my voice, my stamina. Weirdly, all of that was totally fine. I didn't lose my voice, it felt good, I really enjoyed performing that many times and honing the live set in a way that I hadn't had the opportunity to in years.

Shows in Europe are always different than the U.S., but especially post-COVID shutdowns, I noticed a lot of differences from the last time I was out on the road.
There were a lot more places with decibel limits and restrictions on sound and lights. There were also a lot of regions where there were rules about what you were allowed to say onstage about certain political things going on right now, and bans against flags onstage. I also noticed a definite change in the way of like audience interaction. The people that come to my shows tend to be all over the map as far as age range, and for the younger kids who went through what was supposed to be their self-discovery college years from behind a screen, they maybe hadn't had the experience of going to underground shows that got rowdy. So there was maybe less rowdiness, or less of an enthusiastic crowd response. People were really into it—they'd walk up to me afterwards and talk to me—but they were a little more hesitant to interact with me when I was in the crowd.

That massive gap in terms of lived experience post-COVID is a very real thing. I hear it from both sides—either people are more timid because of it, or they're acting out and being assholes because they forgot how to be in public.
I come from the underground punk scene, and this is something we talk about a lot—people are just standing there completely still, not even bopping their heads, or someone's windmill-kicking because they've never actually been to a show and they're watching videos of hardcore bands play in the '80s and trying to imitate what they see on YouTube. People are either going all-in because they're imitating something they saw, or having peers make fun of them if they do something goofy. There's these isolated islands, and everyone's marching to the beat of their own drum—which is cool, but you know.

What was it like for you financially with this latest tour? How does it compare with pre-pandemic experiences?
There's definitely a difference. Here's what I'll say, though: If I'm touring for a month, I'm not at home working on a truck, which is my day job. Maybe I'm not making that much more money than I make at my dead-end. I don't have a high school diploma job, but I work when I'm home.

With playing music, you do have to check yourself a little bit that it's a privilege to have your project sustain itself. I understand people are trying to make a living off music. For me, it's not a fucking career, you know what I mean? I'm an artist. I have to do this, or I'll go insane. If I cannot be destitute in the process—if I can feed myself and pay my rent—if I can do that solely off music, that's amazing. I didn't realize I was doing that for years. I always had a record store job or a couple of bartending shifts or something—but I didn't realize until the pandemic that that shit was not paying my bills. That was just my funny money. Touring and music was actually how I was surviving, and I had to pivot to "Well, there's no music, so I have to just work all the time."

I've been slowly trying to claw my way out of that to get a balance to where I can have enough days off where I can actually write music and go on tour. There's a reason I haven't toured or put out a record since 2019. When you're working five days a week and you come home and your body is broken, and you also want to have a social life and do your laundry...I don't have any delusions about getting back to a place where i'm living off music again. It's more about a balance of, how do I do this enough that I can still work less enough to focus on art? It's definitely harder.

Tell me more about your day job.
It's something that I kind fell into over the pandemic when everyone was expected to work again and there were no more pandemic unemployment checks, but touring and that kind of stuff still isn't happening. I had to figure something out, and I don't even have proof that I went to high school, even though I kind of did—that's a long story. I don't even have any sort of college degree or anything, so I had to figure out like something to do. And, again, this is the middle of the pandemic—restaurants are closing down left and right and still not a thing that are making money on anymore.

I had some friends who are art handlers, so I started getting into that. I work for a shipping, transportation, installation, and fine art services company. Essentially, you're driving all around the city in this big truck, picking up crates from warehouses, loading them into the van, and dropping them off at places. Sometimes you're going to an artist's studio and you're packing their work to be sent to the gallery, and it's still wet. A lot of the time, it's installs where they don't have their own person in-house, so you might be installing an entire gallery show or going to some insanely, grotesquely rich person's house who lives on Park Avenue overlooking Central Park. You're walking into their home and wearing booties and gloves, of course. lest you touch something in their home and make it dirty. You're installing a Picasso on the wall and they'll remind you eight times that it's worth this much money. You move it an inch up and down eight times until it's exactly where it was before you got there, and they're happy.

It's physical labor—a lot of lifting crates around. The funniest one was a literal 800-pound gorilla, which I think was the point of the piece. It was made out of iron or something, and me and two other dudes had to move it down two flights of stairs using pulley ropes. We've had giant 10'-by-10' paintings that don't fit in the elevator—and the person lives on the seventh floor, so it's 300 pounds and it's you and one other person.

But the thing I like about it is, I'm not somebody who can show up to the same room every day and be there with the same people doing the same thing over and over again. I could never have like an office job. I'd go completely insane. So I'm out in the truck driving all around the city. It's kind of nice. I don't have to have a gym membership, because I'm buffer than I've ever been.

My wife worked in the gallery world for a bit before becoming a public librarian, and all the time she'd be like, "These people are fucking disgusting."
That's absolutely my reaction to it as well. I haven't been going to museums or galleries at all since I started working at this job. I go into these artists' studios, and I see what they're doing—they're making the same thing over and over again, in slight variations of color, and the reason they're doing that is they're essentially making a product. When you're installing in these rich peoples' homes, there'll be a few months where, suddenly, everyone's added fabric wallpaper in their home and they all have this one artist's work. You'll see these trends where you're like, "Oh, this is decoration for someone's home"—and all these artists, the successful ones,
know how to hack that. They're not really making conceptual work. They're just making pretty things to put on a wall.

Even the people that are making really cool, great conceptual work—you're like, "Wow, I can't believe I got to touch this artist's work," and then you install it at this person's home and you see the other stuff they have around, and what they have in storage, and the way that they talk about it, and you realize that this is an investment for them. A lot of it, I suspect—and this has been talked about a lot among our handlers—is money laundering, or a way to move assets around so that your wife can't get this in the divorce. It's a way for rich people to move money around. They don't care about the art 90% of the time, and out of the remaining 10%, 5% of the time it's just decoration for them.

There's very few houses where we've done private installs and I'm like, "Oh, this person has taste." I can tell that they have taste in art, they know what they like, and they're just buying stuff that they like. But more often than not, it's about an investment or moving money around, and that is really disturbing.

Furthermore, the way people treat you in the industry is ridiculous. They think that their job is the most important thing in the world, but there's no such thing as an art emergency—there just isn't. I have a boss who used to say that when things get really bad and people are breathing down your neck, just remember that unless you dropped a half-million dollar piece out a window, no one's dying. But people really will behave a certain way.

The amount of waste is also insane. A wooden crate will be used one time and then trashed. The amount of cardboard and plastic used to pack these things...the people I work for are really good about trying to reuse the packing materials, but people are like, "Well, I spent this much money on this thing, so I want it to look a certain way." So every time you move it, you have to use new plastic, a new wooden crate. The dump runs we'd do were, morbidly, one of my favorite parts of the job—not because I enjoyed seeing all of this waste, but because we'd go into the dump and see the kinds of things that people were throwing away. A company made too many couches, so here's 20 brand new couches in the dump.

That was in my mind when I was writing this record—thinking about environmental waste and how it's not necessary. All these things are just to appease the neuroses of rich people. It's completely insane.

Tell me more about how all of that worked its way into the new record. I was having this day-to-day reminder about the difference between making art about something and how the art is actually functioning in the world. You have artists making work about nature and environmental problems, or just a landscape painting that's supposed to be about the beauty of nature, and then you're watching the sale of that piece directly and negatively affecting [nature]. I put out vinyl records, and those get shipped around with gas, and vinyl's made out of petroleum, too. We all have to contend with and confront our own contributions to this, as well as what the role of art is and how effective it is in raising awareness.

I've seen this every day, just from being treated like a subclass human. There's something called an art advisor, who tells rich people what to buy—that's a job. [Rich people] don't even care enough about [art] to spend time deciding what they like. They don't have their own taste—they hire someone to tell them what's a smart investment, who's popular, who's going to look good on their shelf when they have this party with this guest that's coming over, how to impress that person. So I'll walk in off the street with an art advisor, and I'm told to put booties around my shoes to protect their floors from my disgusting working-class feet. Meanwhile, the person that walked in from the same fucking dog shit-smeared sidewalk that I just walked off of, who's right next to me—because they're wearing an expensive suit, they're not asked to do that.

Just on that job, there's daily reminders in my face of the class system in America—of the waste, and of the role of art in that. These are things that already were on my mind, of course—and, it's funny, because I hadn't actually thought about that until this conversation, but I really do think that there's aspects of of that job that drove home the point to me in a way that made it feel very urgent and prescient.

Tell me about the motif of maggots in your work. It's something you've evoked in terms of your art's visual manifestation as well.
As it pertains to this record, it's something that came up when I was researching what they call "body decomposition islands," which is when a body is not embalmed and it's placed in the ground at a certain depth. As it decays, it releases its nutrients back into the ground. You can see how this process is based on certain scientific measurements, and one of them is maggot mass, whcih is exactly what it sounds like. The maggot mass of that body decomposition island will tell you about the variety of flesh flies and botflies. This little mini ecosystem, is it diverse? You tell that through taking a sample, and then you can start to test for things like nitrogen and phosphorus—but that won't be fully there until the cycle is complete, so an early way that you can tell the health of this soil and body decomposition island is the maggot mass.

Backtracking to Abandon, the reason that imagery came about was that I was homeless at the time and had to go through my belongings and get rid of a bunch of stuff. One of the things I was looking through was a love letter from somebody that had dumped me in a really terrible very recently. It was old, and there was a
rose pressed into it, and because it had been sitting in a box for a while with this plant material, when I opened it these maggots came out and fell into my lap. It felt like this perfect encapsulation of the death of this whole part of my life, as well as rebirth through that death.

This latest record had similar themes. In a way, it's closing out this first cycle [of Pharmakon]. Abandon is the birth, Bestial Burden is the meat of it—the embodiment of physicality—whereas Contact is the esoteric, psychic aspect of that same body, and Devour is where it starts coming in on itself and self-destructing. Maggot Mass is the funeral for that, but also a rebirth, because I have very different ideas about where the project is going. This is something I really haven't talked with anybody about yet. but this record is the last in this suite of records as I see it, before it takes a bit of a turn.

It's also funny, because the word "maggot" was a nickname for me for a long time. It was a joke, because "Margaret" and "Maggot" [are similar]. My dad was in this band called Joey Miserable and the Worms, and I was like his little maggot. It was an easy punk name. I've always hated my name, and recently I've been accepting they/them pronouns in addition to she pronouns. It just felt better, neutral, and blessedly non-human.

For me, it's also about the revenge of the underdog. People think of maggots as what a military officer would say to a person that he's grinding into the mud with his boot. "Another 15 pushups, maggot." But when you think about what their role is in the ecosystem, they're hugely important. They do more for the earth than humans do. They have a bigger say in the landscape of life on earth than humans do. They give more, they don't take. They eat dead things and turn it into life, and all we seem to do is create more dead things, and more objects that never were alive in the first place.

Tell me more about your cover art, which has always been pretty striking in relation to your music.
It definitely comes early for me. I'll have these long ranting things that I write that aren't quite diary entries, and as I'm reading and listening to things and calling all this inspiration, I'll start to see a thread among that and start to reread these rants and pick these little moments of poetry out of it and make that into lyrics. Once I have the concept of the record, I start writing lyrics, and that's when I'm thinking about the album cover and title, which usually come in before I've even recorded the record. It starts with a central theme or concept, and all of the imagery that follows is an extension of that—another way to express those ideas.

I'm annoying to work with, because I'm like, "It has to be exactly like this." When my sister and I take the photos, I'll explain to her, "It's going to be a bird's eye view, or at this angle, or cropped in where it's from this part of my torso to this part." I don't leave a ton of wiggle room. But she's so good at what she does and she knows that collaboration is really important to me—to work with someone I trust and know really well, because I'm the subject in all of those photos. I'd just take the photo myself because I'm such a control freak, but I'm not going to cover someone else in maggots, or bury them alive, or cover them in meat, or stick ten people's fingers up their nostrils. I'm only going to make myself do that.

It's also a ritual for me—a physical and visceral embodiment of the concepts
of the records that I go through. That's always how I view the cover art: What is a visceral, visual language that can immediately evoke these thoughts and feelings that I'm trying to discuss? And then I put myself in these extreme, bizarre, and freaky situations that are nerve-wracking for me—just like they'd be for anybody—
and going through that is the ritual performance of that concept. I know the image in my head exactly as I want it, so, I get all the materials, I set everything up, I cover myself in whatever the hell, and I explain to my sister, "This is exactly what I want it to look and feel like," and then we do it.

You mentioned before concerns about losing your voice when it came to playing live again. As a performer, you do some pretty extreme things with your voice in general. How do you typically take care of it?
To be honest, I drink a lot of water before and after—and I don't smoke cigarettes. That's about it. If I have a one-off show, I'll rehearse with the vocals a bunch. I'm sure anyone who's a vocal coach would probably be like, "Don't listen to this person, do the opposite of what they're saying," but if I haven't performed
or done vocals in a while and it's just a one-off show, I'll need to practice with vocals at full throttle in order to "break it in," because it kind of settles. On tour, it's almost easier, because it's like muscle memory for my vocal cords. They're doing it every night, they're used to it, and it's all gravy. So, straight up, I just drink a ton of water. It doesn't have to be hot tea with lemon or anything. I just stay hydrated. I've seen people do all sorts of nebulizers and inhalers, but water—it's nature's elixir, all the way.

You trained Olivia Cooke for her performance in Sound of Metal. Tell me about that experience.
I wrote all of Olivia's guitar parts and the noise, and I didn't write the lyrics, but I helped her learn how to scream, which was an interesting experience. I've spent so much of my artistic time bringing myself to a point of catharsis that I forgot there's a lot of people who might've never put their voice there. They might have raised their voice in an argument, but they've never screamed for themselves. She was such a good sport, because it was really outside of her comfort zone, but she thought it was cool and she wanted to do it.

I'll never forget the first time I was like, "Alright, we're going to scream at the count of three." The first couple of times, she didn't do it. She'd freeze and be like, "Wow, this is harder than I thought. It's a weird, strange, very vulnerable thing to do." And I was like, "Oh yeah, it is a very vulnerable thing to do." It made me think about it differently. The first time she really let one rip, I remember this maniacal smile on her face. She was like, "Oh, I like that." And I was like, "Yeah, it feels good. You can do this anytime you want, you know." It was really cool to watch her get into it.

I had to teach her the guitar parts as well, and I actually was on set when they were recording the shows to help with some visual cues that we had to come up with. If you're a musician, you kind of take it for granted—like, "So, after a measure, this happens four times," and someone's like, "What?" They don't recognize it. Other artists don't have musical brain—they have visual art brain, or performance brain. They don't have the musical brain of timing and things like that. So they made them play the song live at this club, so you could hear their rendition of it live in the room. The director came over and showed me the portable monitor, and I was like, "Wow, that's that movie magic."