For the first edition of Li(quid) Listening, Liquid Architecture invites Joel Stern and Ira Hadžić to perform their distinct and highly detailed sonic works that investigate music, politics, technology, theory and ideas that sit at the brink of global sound culture.

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. From 2013 to 2022, Joel was Artistic Director of Liquid Architecture.

Ira Hadžić is a Berlin-based sound artist with a background in cultural anthropology. Her practice unfolds at the intersections of improvisation, composition, and introspection. Working with gongs, radiophonic forms, field recordings, resonance, minimal sonic gestures, and silence itself, she explores sound as a site of presence and perception. Her projects have been produced by broadcasters such as Deutschlandfunk Kultur and Südwestrundfunk, and have been presented at festivals including Heroines of Sound.