"I don’t belong here, I don’t belong here, I DON’T BELONG HERE," says Margaret Chardiet, her voice rising with the repetition into screams. The song is "Bestial Burden", the title track of her 2014 album; Chardiet, who performs as Pharmakon, wrote it in the aftermath of a life-saving surgery. In the wake of the procedure, she was left thinking about the fallible nature of her body; in response she crafted an album around the idea of her flesh being its own entity, one separated from her consciousness.

It’s challenging to make music that effectively conveys the disturbing nature of corporeality, but Chardiet does it with noise. Primarily using discordant percussion and her voice, she creates space around the listener, one that makes you squirm and demands all of your attention. In that regard, it may have less in common with underground music and is much more akin to sound art’s history of showcasing the body’s most volatile processes and noises.

There are two tracks on Bestial Burden where noises specific to the body are laid bare; the album’s opener, "Vacuum", a track of breathing at varying paces and "Primitive Struggle", two minutes of disturbing choking and coughing. In 1961, Yoko Ono released "Cough Piece", a 30-minute sound piece of Ono coughing. Her coughing is not continuous—in the background listeners can hear what sounds like light traffic and other white noise. Yoko Ono’s piece forces the listener to hear her body and to become more aware of the vulnerabilities present inside of our own.

Much of Swiss sound artist Christof Migone’s practice involves recordings of the corporeal. His 1998 piece "Crackers" layers the cracking of knuckles, necks, and knees into symphonic effect. He took a simple gesture, which he calls a "bone edit," and highlighted the body’s ability to make its own involuntary noises. Even though this noise is small, it’s still a bone cracking, a disturbance. "As the sound of the cracks echo, some wince, others feel relief," Migone wrote of the project. "In all instances, a crack is when and where something breaks."

Ono and Migone’s pieces are delicate compared to the noises Pharmakon mines on Bestial Burden. Her breathing on "Vacuum" is aggravated and the choking on "Primitive Struggle" violent. Her breathing accelerates in "Vacuum" as if she’s running wildly from something and getting more out of breath, the vocals layered into a chorus of anxious panting and gasping. But what makes "Vacuum" and "Primitive Struggle" so scary is that you don’t know what is being done to these bodies to make them sound this way. You don’t expect a terrifying coughing fit halfway through a noise album and the ambiguity of harm being done within these tracks makes them even harder to listen to.

These projects isolate bodily processes and magnify their sound to make the listener more aware of the processes within them, as simply as when someone clears their throat and you immediately feel the need to clear yours. They make you suddenly reflect on your own breathing, overly-conscious about how fast or slow it is. Bodies react to bodies; when a body is in distress, even more so. On Bestial Burden the most powerful noise she has at her disposal is not choking or deep breathing or even her relentless, noise instrumentals; it is her riotous and howling voice.

Though you can rarely decipher exactly what Chardiet is saying (or screaming), it doesn’t really matter. Her animalistic snarls on "Intent or Instinct" sound trapped beneath droning reverb, conveying the hell of her situation. As the record progresses, Chardiet’s voice gets clearer with each song, leading listeners through to the proverbial heart at the end of the album. And once you’ve reached its "Bestial Burden" finale, you are inside her head as she contemplates what it means to feel separated from one’s own body; to feel betrayed by your cells and organs and bones. The body within Bestial Burden is fragile, unreliable.

In Bruce Nauman’s 1968 piece "Get Out of My Mind, Get Out of This Room", his recorded voice repeats the title of the piece and is broadcast in an empty room. As people stand in the room, it becomes claustrophobic; Nauman’s voice, whispering at some points and screaming at others, gives people this space, then turns hostile, demanding that they leave. The piece forces the audience to acknowledge the paradoxical nature of existing in a physical realm that rejects you. "I don’t belong here," Chardiet screams as she confronts herself. "You don’t belong here," Nauman screams at you, making you confront yourself. But whether you’re an intruder into Nauman’s mind or merely a listener intruding into Chardiet’s, both artists use the sound of their screams force you to recoil at the awareness of mere physical existence.

Although more performance than sound art, Marina Abramović’s 1976 piece "Freeing the Voice" was an experiment in doing just as the title suggests: screaming until she lost her voice. Her immobility only enhances her idea of the body as a vessel for her voice which she pushes out of herself like some phantom birth, the voice as a separate being. "When you are screaming in this way, without interruption, first you recognize your own voice," Abramovic said of the piece. "But later, when you are pushing against your own limits, the voice turns into a sound object."

For Abramović and Chardiet, screaming is ultimately about how bodies reacting to conflict and pressure (straining vocal chords, surgery) are unpredictable. And because of this, there’s an inherent separation between the mind and the body, the mind never knowing how the body will turn against it. "It created this separation between the two that resulted in me feeling almost as though the body had this separate will from my own—just this vessel I was stuck inside of," Chardiet told Pitchfork regarding her surgery.

The body work of Chardiet, like these other notable artists, presents these humble infirmaries (or a voice screaming itself to death) as a lesson about the dark unknowability of the body, the strength and fragility embedded within that connects us—and she will whisper, choke, and scream it until we have understood it completely.

Originally published on 11/18/14