Sounds of De-Composition: An Album Review of Pharmakon’s Maggot Mass (Sacred Bones Records, 2024)

“Maggot mass” refers to a cluster of maggots, or larvae, actively feeding on the soft tissues of a decaying corpse. These carrion feeders scour the body’s flesh, liquifying dead tissues with their digestive enzymes and flooding the ground below with nutrients. The resulting “cadaver decomposition island” leaves a rich patch of soil that aids in diversifying the surrounding ecosystem, making the maggot mass a paradoxical sign of both life and death.1 It’s fitting, then, that Maggot Mass is also the title of the latest release from Pharmakon (Margaret Chardiet), who for over a decade has marshaled the sounds of industrial music, harsh noise, and power electronics to relay rigorously developed concept albums tackling bodily breakdown (Bestial Burden, 2014), self-obliterating somatic connection (Contact, 2017), and the eternal return of destruction at the level of psyche and species (Devour, 2019).

Lyrically, the all-too-human existential concerns of Pharmakon’s previous albums tended toward idioms of systems theory: the entropy of closed systems (Bestial Burden’s “Body Betrays Itself”), communication between open ones (Contact’s “Transmission”), and feedback loops that promulgate inward, narcissistic recursion (Devour’s “Self-Regulating System”). Sonically, these systems reverberate through the hard, unrelenting coldness of industrial timbre and electronics. But there’s no question of the organicism coursing through such seemingly inhuman systems. Pharmakon’s extreme vocals oscillate between low growls and sustained shrieks that betray a meaty, bleeding, embodied subject that is very much alive—if kicking and thrashing—among the metallic echoes, including those of her ad-hoc percussive instrument: a handheld, shield-like scrap of sheet metal affixed with a contact mic that acts as a prosthetic of the performer’s body and voice. In the five years since Pharmakon’s last release, it seems a mass of maggots has been festering in the sonic ruptures rent by her cyborgian assemblage.

Having ruptured the boundaries of seemingly self-contained, self-evident human systems, Pharmakon finally confronts the ecological devastation left in their wake. In this respect, Maggot Mass marks a significant expansion of her previous albums’ focus on individual bodily failure and abstract self-destruction. Her earlier albums tarry in the transcendental aspirations of extreme genres, with cathartic compositions that envelop the listener in self-annihilating trances, which are achieved through washes of noise punctuated with clarifying—if confrontational—intros, outros, and climaxes. Together these elements imply a narrative arc of an injured or sickly body struggling into form, achieving either transcendence or total annihilation. But in Maggot Mass, any semblance of narrative is piled up or sloughed onto the listener all at once. The unassimilable debris of densely mixed, unidentifiable vocals and unsourceable instrumentation menacingly encircle and assault the listener, refusing to be channeled into a satisfying catharsis.

The album’s overall downbeat dredge owes largely to Pharmakon’s vocals: her phlegmatic growls and low intonations border on spoken word and bubble on the surface of this sludge. Pharmakon’s extreme vocal (non)technique once legendarily pushed her vocal cords to bleed during a rehearsal of the 2017 track “Nakedness of Need.”2 On prior albums these iconic shrieks and screams were either given breathing room or diffused into the mix to complement the metallic textures of the industrial soundscape. Maggot Mass does not let Pharmakon’s vocal cords rest, but rather than smoothly tracking into the mix, her sporadic shrieks sputter or shoot up from the soundscape like gas flares. Instead of soaring to sonic heights that might provide the pleasurable reprieve of a toxic or industrial sublime—aesthetics so endemic to ecocentric art—Maggot Mass tends to suspend the listener in an oil-drenched, sludgy, sinking morass of garbage.

While Maggot Mass resists sonic ascent, it also refuses the listener’s easy dissolution into the earth. With its haunting album art reminiscent of a pagan burial (freighted with its own connotations of racial erasure and uncritical embrace of white Europeanism) one may wonder whether the album resorts to escapism, a desire to dissolve into undifferentiated matter, to be absolved of personhood and simply become maggot. The first track momentarily indulges this fantasy: “Wither and Warp” opens with crunching plant matter and buzzing insects that give way to dirge-like industrial percussion, over which Pharmakon wills herself to dissolve as a “harmless substance” into the earth, to be “a good mother” to carrion feeders. But these dreams of harmonious dissolution are delivered in a disjunctive monstrous growl. Meanwhile, the unrelenting sonic texture gives voice to the bowels of the earth, which—sunken and sliding from so much extraction—refuse the speaker’s harmonious reunion with an idealized nature.

Instead of offering an irenic earth, the fuzzy and feedback-ridden soundscapes of Maggot Mass evoke what Georges Bataille calls “base matter.” In defiance of philosophical tendencies to reduce matter to an inert resource or denigrated “base” in contrast to and in service of a privileged ideal, Bataille theorizes base matter as the excess of heterogenous forces that constantly threaten to destabilize the hierarchical divisions humans are wont to impose.3 Across his works, Bataille speculates about the possibilities for ritual acts of destruction, transgression, or expenditure to shake one out of the closed systems that instrumentalize and isolate humans from the ongoing flux of base matter—an ethical and aesthetic task since taken up by “noise” music and music scholarship on the affirmative potential of such harsh sounds.4 So as much as Maggot Mass refers to a measure of soil richness and decomposition, as a hybrid album of harsh genres it also evokes a Bataillean ritual mass of communing with the excesses of base matter—a ritual mass that does not give way to a transcendental, more perfect state, but instead implicates the listener in the ongoing torrent of matter’s unassimilable difference.

It follows, then, that Pharmakon’s “sweet dream” of funeral rites—as the lyrics retroactively describe the events of “Whither and Warp”—is rudely awakened by the propulsive rhythm of “Methanal Doll,” a hardcore anthem relaying the banal fact that such “green” burials are still legally and financially cumbersome. Moreover, the lyrics lament, industry-standard rituals of human embalming and cremation perpetuate the isolation and commodification of human bodies after death, with cadavers either embalmed “in a box, like methanal dolls” or burned to ash in “a plastic bag.” The rest of the album reckons with the tragedy of being a consumer subject from dust to dust—or, increasingly, plastic to plastic. Pharmakon, after all, is artificial.5 A term ambiguously freighted with the dual meaning of medicine and poison, pharmakon, as Jacques Derrida theorizes it, most fundamentally disturbs the course of “natural life” and “normal development.”6 Pharmakon, like base matter, unsettles the givenness of normal development on the tracks “Buyer’s Remorse” and “Splendid Isolation,” which protest the extraction and enslaved labor that make possible the naturalized lives of consumer subjects-cum-methanal dolls. With these thorny and uneven compositions, Pharmakon cuts across genres and traditional song structures, making good on the titular maxim of her 2017 track, “No Natural Order.” Instead of prescribing a satisfying sonic remedy, Maggot Mass unsettles the natural order of listening, inducing the listener to critically confront the porosity, fallibility, and tyranny of their own closed systems.

The half-hour album of sludgy, slowed-down listening swells into a well-earned crescendo on “Oiled Animals,” but this apocalypticism is undercut by a looped, distorted vocal sample. Increasing in volume and clarity until all other noises fade out, the robotic speaker insists that they must consume to survive:

I wish that I could photosynthesize. To make food out of life and water, to make medicines and give them away for free, to do the work of the world and for the world while standing silently. But I can’t. I’m not an autotroph or a producer but a heterotroph, an animal. I’m destined by my biology to be a consumer. I must take from the world in order to live.

Curiously, this closing monologue closely resembles a passage in Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass. In a section titled “the Honorable Harvest,” Kimmerer, a Potawatomi botanist, recounts a day spent foraging in the early spring thaw, daydreaming about becoming a photosynthesizer, “to do the work of the world while standing silent in the sun.”7 Yet, she concedes, “this generosity is beyond my realm, as I am a mere heterotroph, a feeder on the carbon transmuted by others. In order to live, I must consume.”8

But where Pharmakon’s looping, disembodied voice recording seems to resign itself to the “splendid isolation” of capitalist consumption, justified by an appeal to biological destiny, Kimmerer affirms the unique agency and responsibility afforded by her difference from the matter with which she exists in continual exchange:

I am not the vibrant leaves on the forest floor—I am the woman with the basket, and how I fill it is a question that matters. If we are fully awake, a moral question arises as we extinguish the other lives around us on behalf of our own. … [H]ow do we consume in a way that does justice to the lives that we take?9

Kimmerer goes on to share guidelines for the Honorable Harvest, “the indigenous canon of principles and practices that govern the exchange of life for life.”10 It’s a purposeful exchange in which late-capitalist human heterotrophs must actively struggle to participate.11 With its voice distortion and robotic insistence on biological destiny, Pharmakon’s remix of Kimmerer might signal a nihilistic retreat into the feedback loops of closed systems, doomed to the eternal return of human destruction. The citation is unsettling and unsatisfying. But the track cuts off abruptly, as if to make room for the listener’s response. In keeping with the rest of the album’s stringent refusal of transcendent highs or absolving lows, the listener is left to sift through the sludge and debris, to reckon with their positionality, and to respond. Maggot Mass is no remedy, but as unrelenting pharmakon, it sonically cleaves apart closed systems and affirms the struggle to proliferate otherwise in their wake.

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Bethany Fincher is a PhD student in Visual and Cultural Studies at the University of Rochester and a member of IVC's editorial board. Her research explores American land art, performance, and body art of the 1960s and '70s through the lens of ecocriticism and energy cultures. She also writes on sound, noise studies, and the intersections of ecohorror and body horror.