Pharmakon + aska // Cassiopeia, Berlin

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). aska is the project of Kristófer Páll, an Icelandic poet and composer now based in Berlin. Emerging from the Icelandic black metal scene, Kristófer found electronic music to be the ideal platform to experiment with spoken word, merging coldwave and industrial into miserable angst pop.