PHARMAKON (USA), PFARRE (AT)

(Sacred Bones, USA)

Margaret Chardiet is an interdisciplinary sound artist born and based in New York City. Raised by underground musicians and artists, Margaret was surrounded by a collective of the city’s impassioned, cultural detritus. Instead of following a path of higher education, she began the experimental project Pharmakon in 2006, at the age of 16.

Pharmakon as a project, entity, and process, has evolved and exists in true protean form, developing alongside (or more so within) Margaret’s personal experience and auto-didactic philosophies. Her work as a whole is a forced self-possession, a celebration of ferality and viscereality, which performatively abandons a society that has never accepted anything it couldn’t also exploit. Chardiet uses electronic synthesis as a tool to transfer this self-possession physiologically and intra-spatially into the bodies of their audience. Timbre becomes temper. Ferality, a social contagion or biorhythm. Margaret has also played in numerous punk groups that extend out to a greater international D.I.Y. music community, and has composed score and original music for the films Transfiguration (2017), and Sound of Metal (2019).

Kristina Pia Hofer has been involved in the alternative pop scene in the Austrian capital for many years and under many pseudonyms;

such as Ana Threat, whose name refers to the fact that the art figure she has created can also be a threat, but is a producer, a media theorist, festival curator, but above all: she is an artist and a musician. She started out in the punk band Anarchophobia, and soon learnt to play bass, guitar and drums - she spread her acoustic energies across numerous projects: These included The Happy Kids, Happy Birthday Juanita, Puke Puddle, The Boiler, Voiler and the duo Kristy and the Kraks.

PfARRE is her current black metal project, which is spherical, dark and intense!




(photo: karl_mane)