Pharmakon, "Wither and Warp" (Sacred Bones Records)

My favorite American noise artist, Pharmakon (aka Margaret Chardiet), returns to the arena with "Wither and Warp," another harrowing report from the infernal depths of her tormented imagination. It's the first single from her forthcoming fifth album, the cheerfully titled Maggot Mass (out October 4), and her first new LP since 2019's intensely grim and thrashing Devour. 

If one major purpose of noise music is to provide catharsis for the multitude of traumas modern existence visits upon the human psyche, then Pharmakon's output has proved to be among the most effective at this important task. In some ways, she is the 21st-century successor to early Swans, albeit with lyrics that are much harder to decipher than Michael Gira's. But the vibe of abject disgust with the body and the human condition is similar. 

Part of what makes Pharmakon's tracks so impactful is her acute way with dynamics. Many noise artists believe a monolithic slab of static sound suffices, as long as it's extremely grating and makes normies run toward the exits. Elite noisicians such as Pharmakon know that a chiaroscuro of loud and quiet parts and timbral shifts stimulate mind and body more effectively. Another element that elevates Pharmakon is her deft use of the outermost ranges of her voice, which make the late comedian Sam Kinison's screams seem demure. 

"Wither and Warp" begins innocuously, almost like a Burial track, all ASMR triggers of feet trampling brush and wind... until insects start swarming and foreboding, wooden beats start pounding. Soon after, an animal rattles its cage, and scathing metallic fibrillating commences as Pharmakon sings in her lowest, clearest register to date. Actually, she sounds a lot like Gira circa 1983, her tone lousy with disdain and devoid of mercy. A bulbous synthesized bass (or is it a radically downtuned guitar?) adds another malevolent layer of filth over the sonic scuffling. For over eight minutes, Chardiet maps a hellish scenario that sounds starker than her previous work, but just as pungently soul-shaking. 

Chardiet says that the song was inspired by a dream in which her "self" had died and she decayed into the earth, yet was still conscious—and she felt happy about this condition. In a press release, Chardiet says, "This dream-logic hinged upon the hope that when we die, the body merely breaks down back into the energy that was trapped inside its matter. And all the carrion-eaters who might devour 'you' will surely take 'you' into 'them,' rendering your death back into the folds of life. This song represents the ecstasy of that dream… joy in (a lack of) existence, the self scattered throughout many forms of being. How sweet the vision of a death without waste." No wonder she records for Sacred Bones...

Deli Kuvveti, “Micro Dramas” (Evel)

I can't recall how Seattle-based, Turkish producer Deli Kuvveti crossed my radar, but I'm glad he did. (Maybe it was through Bandcamp's recommendations email? Yeah, let's go with that.) Trying to find info about Kuvveti has proved difficult. His music's not on the evil streaming service that's based in Sweden, and his social media presence is scant. 

Thankfully, Kuvveti (aka software engineer Derya Susman) reveals enough about his aesthetics on Bandcamp to offer insights. His motto—"Looking for the right ways to make the wrong sounds."—instantly drew me in to his enigmatic sound world. And his BC page offers abundant examples of that perverse ethos dating back to 2020. 

Going back to the fertile plague year of 2021, The sublime grows fangs in a cradle of fear contains Autechre-esque rhythmic discombobulation and textural abrasiveness. Kuvveti created these "glitchy loops" by using "various Max/MSP patches and ppooll." So far, so heady. Stars Against the Dusk offers spacey, tranquil ambience speckled with unexpected mechanical noises, an unusual strategy for chillout music. But the same release also features twitchy, glitchy convolutions in that classic style of turn-of-the-century IDM. This stuff is crawling with fascinating, microscopic activity.

Kuvveti's latest release, Micro Dramas (on the Cádiz, Spain label Evel), abounds with tracks that scan as ambient, but have a lot of interesting things going on below the surface. On opening piece "Butterflies gone to sleep," beautiful ambient swells are repeatedly disrupted by distorted, rogue tones and acutely sculpted glitches. "Mbt1" sounds like a lot of German abstract electronic music that the excellent Mille Plateaux label issued in the '90s and '00s. At once calming and uneasy, the track teems with turmoil at the cellular level. "Mbt2" combines serene, Seefeel-like sounds with irregular thumps and factory-floor grinding. Like much of Micro Dramas, it's a microcosm of the struggle between peace and unrest. 

The title cut blends environmental sound collage with sub-aquatic atmosphere, harking back to '80s Seattle experimentalists such as K. Leimer and Marc Barreca. It's not easy to hold a listener's attention for over 24 minutes, but Kuvveti does a superb job of manifesting the intrigue and intricate sonic action that keep synapses firing. We need more tech bros who are as creative as Deli Kuvveti.