Secret Thirteen Interview - Pharmakon

Exploring the reality of physical existence - Pharmakon interviewed

Pharmakon's concise burst of crystal and intense energy was one of the highlights of this year's Unsound. It was an excellent pairing with Swans long meditative journey afterwards and exploded with aggressive youthful energy embedded in metallic scrap rhythms and ice-cold noise facades. It was a cold, but very intimate and personal performance - a young woman's experience put in abrasive, yet elegant soundscapes.

Pharmakon's show nicely revealed the moods of her recent album “Bestial Burden” released on Sacred Bones Records. The strong personal presence and the human element were always very prevalent in her art, where noise mechanics stay very close to bodily experiences, personal struggles and the abilities of her voice. Thus her music always balances between unhomely elements of our own physical existence and beautiful honesty.

This interview was done just before Margaret's show in Teatr Lažnia Nowa situated in a remote monolith suburb Nowa Huta in Krakow during this year Unsound. The brief conversation covered many diverse issues such as revisiting painful experiences, relation with audience, femininity in noise/power electronics scene and the origins of her art.

Interview:

It would be great to talk a bit about your new album "Bestial Burden". You made the album after having serious health problems and it is directly influenced by it? Could you elaborate on the story of the album? Was it difficult to revisit the experiences after the recovery?

Well, it happened simultaneously, so it wasn't as much a revisiting as it was the way of processing it while this was happening. The lyrics of the record are the result of being stuck in bed for three weeks and having nothing to do, but read and write. And those writings became the lyrics of the record. Sound that I made while I was bed-ridden ended up becoming the song for the record so it was more the processing of it at the time when it happened.

After releasing the album do you feel better? Do you feel like you put your bad emotions and experiences into it and got rid of that?

Honestly no. I think there are certain realizations that you can know intellectually, but when you experience them in a way that affects you so that you can feel it imminently they stay with you. Of course I don't feel it as fervently as I did at the time of the surgery and the recovery, but then on tour every night I am saying these words that I wrote during the time bringing myself back to that place. I think this record was not about the acceptance of the moving on from these things, it wasn’t so much cathartic. It was almost a defeat or some admission of harsh reality of a human existence.

When you play live you have a very direct contact with public and try to engage with it emotionally. Have you ever experienced some negative reactions or clashes with public? Is it always easy to have a close contact with people who might be not always positive on what you do?

I don't think that the necessary reaction is positive. I think that some people who gave me the most negative responses in their actions are the same people coming after the show and telling me that it affected them, asking me questions and wanting to know why I was doing what I was doing. Those are the people that sometimes feel it in a way that is more sincere than just "Yeah, cool", you know, which is also a valid response, because everyone enters a live show in different stages of initiation and knowledge of what's going to happen and have different opinions about it formed beforehand. Hopefully by the end of the performance the only goal is that they have been honest with themselves in their reaction to the performance and that they felt something, were moved in someway. Even if they are like "I don't like someone making me feel this way". And you feel that they are not gonna listen to it again or they come away from feeling upset. I think that movement of another person's being is the goal.

Recently you received quite an extensive attention from more mainstream music media (like Pitchfork etc). Was it a big change? Did you notice anything different after this publicity?

It's weird, because both of the Pitchfork interviews were done by my friend Brandon. I knew him before he even started working for them and trusted him. We had conversations on same topics before it was ever reported that we will have this official interview. I don't read internet blogs or check-up on reviews or sales or anything like that afterwards. I let interview be like a conversation, because a lot of time reading it back is a bit disappointing to be honest. Press is something that I have a hard time with a lot, because it turns a conversation into sound bytes.

I mean maybe it has affected my career, but in my experience it hasn't really changed the way that I do things. I mean, maybe at my shows there are more people, but it’s hard to say that it affected the situation significantly.

Now going back to the origins, when everything started. What was the first trigger/impact, that made you enter the noise scene?

It was just hearing it for the first time. My sister had an ex-boyfriend, who was into noise for a while. After meeting me and having conversation he was like "you are very serious, freaky and miserable, so maybe you like noise, cause I like it and your sister doesn't." Now at the time she makes it too, but at that time she wasn’t into this music. I tried to show her and she didn't like it. So he made me a mix CD. And it was like the floor fell out from beneath me. I found the thing that I didn't know, that I wanted to make, because nothing else satisfied the urge of making art that was not just chord on the guitar and not just a picture of something. I wanted something that was more, but I was really young and I didn't know about it, which way to go, so when I heard noise it was just immediate fascination and obsession.