Margaret Chardiet aka Pharmakon has been a stalwart of New York’s underground experimental music scene since the age of seventeen. Her riveting mix of industrial noise and assaultive singing provides the foundation for a back catalog of music that questions what it means to be human.

Devour, which takes its name from Pharmakon’s latest album, uses self-cannibalism as an allegory of people’s self-destructive nature. Naked forms tear away at flesh and limbs in this part psychological, part body horror music video made in collaboration with award-winning French-American filmmaker Jacqueline Castel and multimedia artist Caroline Schub.

"The edit was approached as a conceptual video zine," says Castel. "It's a surrealist cut-up of dissociative, abstracted figures clashing against static, unidentifiable flesh, and visceral moments of performance, to once again echo the narrative of a body in crisis."

Schub created still life casts of her own torso, which were used for a gruelling series of shoots where she consumed her own gelatin body cast. "Her flesh became our collective canvas," says the director. "It was an exploration of the act of devouring oneself as an attempt to balance the agony of existence."