Margaret Chardier will be appearing on Pharmakon’s new LP, Mass of maggotsA sequel to the New York noise musician’s 2019 album Devour Expected to arrive on October 4th Sacred bonesToday’s announcement comes in conjunction with the release of new single “WITHER AND WARP.” Listen to the song below and scroll below for the album cover and tracklist.
“Mass of maggots “It was born out of a disgust for the dysfunctional relationship humans have with the environment and other life on Earth,” Chardier explained in a press release.
The work touches on the wounds of loneliness caused by broken bonds and asks us to face the mirror and acknowledge our personal and institutional responsibility.
What peace can we make with privilege when we understand that the real price of comfort is not money but death? What peace can we make with death when we impose on it the same broken hierarchies with which we organize our lives? How much is it worth living in the solitude of a self-imposed kind of solitude?
Humans measure value only in relation to themselves, on the scale of never-ending exponential accumulation. This is what we call wealth. This is what we consider power. We calculate our meaning in money, assets, things; influence, dominance, and control. Western tradition prescribes a hierarchy of beings and places us at the apex of evolution. We think of ourselves as somehow separate from the rest of the “natural world,” its primary narrator and the center of every orbit. This delusion turns bodies into things, land into property, and people into disposable tools.
If our worth is determined by the richness of our interrelationship to the very fabric of existence, to the very existence of being, to our role in the ecosystem of land and people… who is to say that humans are more valuable than boring maggots?
The maggots feed on death and alchemize it back into life. They break down matter and recycle its nutrients. One gift produces another. They soon transform miraculously into flies and go on to pollinate 70% of the plants. They are the midwives and messengers of the Earth’s flora. And we? We pollute instead of pollinating. A chosen few profit from scouring, plundering and desecrating at the expense of the many. The result is a loss of diversity of life on Earth and the degradation and death of those they trample to satisfy their lusts.
In an attempt to reconcile my personal and global grief and loss, I sought solace in envisioning rebirth through death. I longed to revel in the interconnectedness of decay and celebrate the beauty of rebirth through degeneration. But waking from these dreams, I was forced to acknowledge the great gulf between the possibility of communion with the Earth and the feasibility of that connection in this reality under the control of our establishment. The dominance of capital milks every aspect of our lives, even death. I imagined one of many possible paths through this gulf. What if our final choice, our final act, and lasting legacy, was to give back what we had received from the chaos of creation? What if we offered not only our lives but also our deaths to the cause of the existence of Being…
Lyric-wise, I’ve never rhymed, used traditional verse structures, or avoided pronouns at all costs, so this time I incorporated all of those metaphors and wrote in a voice that was more accessible and direct for the listener. I also wanted to explore new ways to use my voice beyond speaking or shouting, so I experimented with new vocal techniques that balanced tension and rasping with melody and rhythm.
Compositionally, we decided to forego any traditional song structures and instead dabble in “music” rather than “noise” this time, resulting in “solos”, “bridges” and “verse and choruses” scattered throughout the record.
Once molted
From this human skin
I will find my home
And my ancestral relatives…
Coffin birth
The ecosystem of my corpse
Regarding Wither and Warp, Chardier said:
The lyrics of this song began with an euphoric, vivid hallucinatory dream. In it, there was no “I”, there was just. No memory, no identity, no ego. Suspended outside of time, there was only this moment. Forgetting. There were no true thoughts, only pleasant, unfamiliar sensations. I felt the tingling growing pains of the growing roots and the tingling of minerals permeating them. I heard a babbling of information coursing through my body, all chemical communication. A vague consciousness slowly grew of being a moss cushioning a stone. I was mesmerized by the beauty of existence as a plant, a producer that takes only sun, air and water and gives back countless things in return.
In this dream, I was dead as “myself.” I had vanished into the earth, becoming, through the divine transformation of decay, a part of it, or many parts of it. And I was more content with this mode of existence than with my life as a human. The logic of this dream hinged on the hope that when we die, the body simply reverts to the energy that was trapped in its matter. And all the carrion eaters that might devour “you” would surely take “you” into “them” and return your death to the folds of life. This song expresses the ecstasy of that dream…the joy of (the lack of) existence, the self scattered across many forms of existence.
How sweet the vision of a lean death is. But, as always, we must wake up from such sweet dreams…
Mass of maggots Cover artwork:
Mass of maggots Track listing:
1. Withered and distorted
2. Metanaldol
3. Buyer’s remorse
4. Splendid isolation
5. Oiled Animals
