Pharmakon Nkisi Tube Tentacles

The final line-up for our upcoming event features three artists whose works harness from different perspectives the phantasmagorias, mystifications and servitudes of modern society to erode it from within, stripping it of the facade of perfect normality—ostensibly governed by the laws of flawless scientific and technological rationality—which conceals its mythological nature, inhabited by the morbid, apotropaic rituals of economic exchange.

Hailing from New York City, Margaret Chardiet will oil the event with one of the intensely provocative performances transmitted by her lifelong, programmatic industrial noise project Pharmakon. Following the spawn of its fifth transformation after a five-year hiatus, she will also present new material of this maggot mass that explores the human condition and purges the embodiments of real abstraction.

Congo-born London-based oracle Nkisi will exhibit a specimen of Black Industrial/Noise in the form of an extended 3-hour DJ set aligned with the ongoing homonymous project by the Black Industrial Research Group (BIRG), bringing her own approach to a theoretical framework that “reclaims a postcolonial lineage of techno and noise within a loosely defined concept of Black Industrialism”. Tracing its roots from the ethnomusicological wax cylinders recorded in Africa in the early 20th century—whose overlooked anomalies can be seen as a form of proto-noise avant la lettre—to the Black British urban experience, Melika Ngombe Kolongo’s sorcery invokes the experimental and aberrant uses of teknology, inherent to the radical forms of so-called popular music, to expose its false official neutrality.

Tube Tentacles is—in the words of Fernando O. Paíno—“the closest thing to what you fear most”. Owner of a unique setup comprising valve synthesizers and other industrial rarities, Enrique Garoz de Diego’s output spans a range of projects including splits with legendary Japanoise artists and recent releases on labels such as Deathbed Tapes. To try out an exercise in defamiliarisation, Tube Tentacles will perform for the first time at an unusual hour and show his elusive vision, the product of an atmospheric and penetrating conception of noise that brings it closer to the most abstract non-human entities of Lovecraftian cosmic horror, in line with CCRU’s representations of Capital.

Art by Ex-All