Live performance: Powers (with Joel Stern, Australia)
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Live performance: Powers (with Joel Stern, Australia)
5pm: Doors open.
Sarjeant Gallery café and bar open from 5pm – 7.30pm.
6pm: Showtime
Powers is Campbell Kneale performing and recording his immersive blitzkrieg guitar-ragas entirely in the moment, walking the musical tightrope between triumph and humiliation, daring the ground beneath his feet to splinter and collapse in harmful fractals of fire and smoke. Inspired by ’60s New York loft minimalism, ’70s Kosmische synth, ‘80s No Wave, ’90s Scandinavian black metal demos, and ’00s Japanoise, POWERS pushes a single electric guitar into transcendental, excoriating, and stroboscopic extremes. Impossibly dense, defiantly raw, and utterly hypnotic, POWERS sets the controls for the heart of a freezing black sun... unfurling the unfathomable with occultic, apocalyptic sound.
Joel Stern is a Naarm/Melbourne-based artist working across experimental music, sound art, and live media performance. His practice explores the politics and poetics of listening, moving through the unstable terrain between the synthetic and the real—where voices are cloned, sounds are repeated and transformed, and meaning fractures under pressure.
Working with modular synthesis, generative systems, and synthetic voice, Stern’s performances unfold as dense, shifting assemblages of noise, text, and rhythm. Fragments of speech emerge and dissolve; patterns loop, stutter, and mutate; signals drift between legibility and abstraction. Drawing on traditions of improvisation, text-sound composition, and electronic music, his work probes how technologies of reproduction—sampling, synthesis, machine listening—reshape perception, memory, and expression.
He has performed extensively in Australia and internationally, both solo and through long-running projects including Machine Listening and Sky Needle. His work has appeared at festivals and venues such as Unsound, Soft Centre, Melbourne Recital Centre, and beyond.
5pm: Doors open.
Sarjeant Gallery café and bar open from 5pm – 7.30pm.
6pm: Showtime
Powers is Campbell Kneale performing and recording his immersive blitzkrieg guitar-ragas entirely in the moment, walking the musical tightrope between triumph and humiliation, daring the ground beneath his feet to splinter and collapse in harmful fractals of fire and smoke. Inspired by ’60s New York loft minimalism, ’70s Kosmische synth, ‘80s No Wave, ’90s Scandinavian black metal demos, and ’00s Japanoise, POWERS pushes a single electric guitar into transcendental, excoriating, and stroboscopic extremes. Impossibly dense, defiantly raw, and utterly hypnotic, POWERS sets the controls for the heart of a freezing black sun... unfurling the unfathomable with occultic, apocalyptic sound.
Joel Stern is a Naarm/Melbourne-based artist working across experimental music, sound art, and live media performance. His practice explores the politics and poetics of listening, moving through the unstable terrain between the synthetic and the real—where voices are cloned, sounds are repeated and transformed, and meaning fractures under pressure.
Working with modular synthesis, generative systems, and synthetic voice, Stern’s performances unfold as dense, shifting assemblages of noise, text, and rhythm. Fragments of speech emerge and dissolve; patterns loop, stutter, and mutate; signals drift between legibility and abstraction. Drawing on traditions of improvisation, text-sound composition, and electronic music, his work probes how technologies of reproduction—sampling, synthesis, machine listening—reshape perception, memory, and expression.
He has performed extensively in Australia and internationally, both solo and through long-running projects including Machine Listening and Sky Needle. His work has appeared at festivals and venues such as Unsound, Soft Centre, Melbourne Recital Centre, and beyond.
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Where is it happening?
Te Whare o Rehua Sarjeant Gallery, 4 Pukenamu Drive,Wanganui, New Zealand
Event Location & Nearby Stays:
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Host or PublisherTe Whare o Rehua Sarjeant Gallery
