Joel Stern is a musician, artist and curator based in Melbourne, Australia. With Patrick, he was the co-founder of framework radio in it’s Resonance FM incarnation. That was a long time ago.
More recently, Joel has been producing quadraphonic works for analogue electronics and sequenced LED lights. This ongoing investigation, which he calls Chromatic Aberrations, investigates light and sound as forms of transferable energy which can be playfully and unpredictably harnessed. The work has been described by stroboscopic film artist Bruce McClure as “a tiny carnival”. Joel has performed Chromatic Aberrations extensively in Australia. In April and May, he’ll travel to Europe to present these works at Tectonics 2015.
Joel also performs and records with the group Sky Needle, a unique ensemble of instrument builders described by The Wire's David Keenan as “one of the most radically original and self-sufficient performance units in the world”. Sky Needle have a forthcoming LP, documenting their 2013 European tour, on Belgian weirdo imprint Ultra Eczema.
Joel is artistic director of the Australian organisation Liquid Architecture which commissions and presents projects, festivals, performances and situations by the world’s leading artists working with sound. He is also the cofounder of OtherFilm, a collective that investigates the capacity of the ‘moving image’ to reorient perception, and The Instrument Builders Project, an experimental collaborative project between Australian and Indonesian artists and musicians. As a curator and organiser, Joel has been responsible for festivals, publications, exhibitions, screenings and concerts in Australia and internationally for over ten years.
www.liquidarchitecture.org.au
otherfilm.org
skyneedle.org