Photo of Pharmakon by Valerie Paschall

While D.C. music’s notoriety lies in genres such as hardcore and go-go, noise has started to gain more of a foothold in the past decade and even the past year. Five years ago, an artist like Pharmakon would not have drawn more than a skeleton crew of diehards and might have skipped the area entirely for a proposed date on a Sunday night. While certainly not selling out the Black Cat Backstage, Pharmakon drew a diverse audience for a brutally intense aural experience.

After two synth-dance acts that channeled New Order and Depeche Mode (albeit without the gloss of acts like Cut Copy), Pharmakon’s Margaret Chardiet killed the lights, leaving only one eerie red lamp to illuminate her table full of samplers and effects gadgetry. She did not try to ease the audience into her set, but immediately hit the audience with harsh and tinny sounds that were somehow both off-putting and captivating. Chardiet proceeded to wander around her table onstage, her face contorted in some sort of blind rage as she shrieked in a distorted voice. It felt strangely as if an exorcism was occurring onstage although Chardiet hardly embodied the force of good.

The set itself only lasted for fifteen minutes, although it felt much longer due to both the lack of breaks between songs and the sheer power of the performance. While she did ease us out of her hold it was not before marching through the audience, grunting, howling and shrieking like a dying carnivorous animal. It was the sort of spectacle that was as much performance art as music. In fact, one neighboring concertgoer who had attended the performance art festival SuperNOVA that weekend quipped that nothing he’d seen in Rosslyn had felt as genuine or as moving as Chardiet’s fifteen minutes on stage. Thanks to D.C.’s sudden willingness to welcome such experiences, she may even return shortly to overpower us again.