Bestial Burden

By injecting a self-serious genre with a sense of theatre, Bestial Burden makes Chardiet's music more engaging without dulling its edge.

Bestial Burden, remarkably, achieves exactly what it sets out to do: to turn the gory inner mechanics of the body outward, and lay bare its unpredictable capacity for self-destruction.

Bestial Burden works because of its methodical execution--a calculated piece of catharsis that towers over all other bedroom power electronics tape-peddlers. [No. 114, p.59]

In the early 1980s Swans and Einstürzende Neubauten broke new ground in their obsession with the body as a site of painful affliction, and traces of both can certainly be found in the grinding, reverberant noise that stalks Bestial Burden. Yet the album easily transcends its influences, forming a bleak, distressing narrative of a self on the brink of collapse.

With her heavily processed voice floating through the feedback, it's the remarkably detailed cry of a soul on fire.

Chardiet's brush with mortality seems to have added extra weight to her disturbing compositions.

Bestial Burden, in its immediacy, in its primal, abrasive engagement with the senses, reaches across the division of bodies to speak directly to you.

Bestial Burden is not much fun to listen to, even for those of us who take great pleasure in noisy, abstract, unhappy music. So if you really need to hit bottom and feel about as misanthropic and nauseous as possible in order to bounce back, Bestial Burden might be just the thing.

As a whole, Bestial Burden highlights Chardiet’s ability to re-draw the boundaries of her own artistic approach, ripping out its guts and creating something new out of the decaying remains.

Songs often exist to structure a moment of reflection, to set reality into a structure to breathe for a moment; noise, on the other hand, often embodies the lack of breath. That’s rarely as true as it is with the latest from Margaret Chardiet’s Pharmakon, Bestial Burden.

The album is at its most gut-wrenching when it puts the humanity behind its creation on display.

This is that rare music that genuinely deserves the descriptor ‘visceral’: sonic body horror that comes on like avant-garde composer Diamanda Galas scoring David Cronenberg.

Death is inevitable and we don’t know what’s on the other side, so while we’re here just put everything into it. Bestial Burden is the sound of Pharmakon doing exactly that.

Chardiet’s electronic manipulations are subtler and more thought out than those of many of her peers. This, ultimately, means that Bestial Burden, like Abandon before it, deserves to be considered as near the top of its class.

Bestial Burden is immensely captivating and exquisitely structured, another unique offering from an unparalleled artist.