Vitor Joaquim

Flow -" one of the Best Electronic Records of the year" -Rewind 2006 -WIRE magazine

"Joaquim is a key figure in Portuguese electronic music, as well as being heavily involved in a number of cross-media activities (film, visual arts, dance, etc). Flow takes as its basis the human voice (provided by fellow Crónica artist Filipa Hora) and synthesizes a bleak but beautiful electronic meditation on the nature of identity. "Slow Moments" is strongly reminiscent of AGF's fractured confessionals, with Hora's conspirational whisper negotiating a path through a sonic landscape littered with other samples of her voice. "Thinking Moments" captures the tiny sounds of moistened lips and snatched breath, adding heavily processed guitar to the mix, creating an engagingly intimate tone poem. Joaquim has a great gift for drawing out rhythmic and melodic patterns from the shards of sound produced by his software, giving Flow a pop heart that could see it finding favour with fans of the more "consumer-friendly" glitchery of Fennesz, Microstoria, et al." ______Keith Moline / WIRE magazine (08.2006)

Vitor Joaquim, laptop experimentalist, sound and visual artist, graduated in Sound and Film Directing, working now on a PhD on Computer Music, field of Science and Art Tecnology.Started performing improvised music and get involved in contemporary dance in the 80’s with Mark Haim at the CDLisbon and Coogan Dancers in Munich. Since then, he has been composing for dance, theatre, cinema, video, installations and multimedia, having worked with such collectives and creators as: Mónica Calle, Mark Haim, Vera Mantero, Paulo Ribeiro, Maria João Pires, Álvaro Correia, Luis Fonseca, Vitor Garcia, Guillermo Weickert, Errequeerre, Sónia Rocha, Sandro Aguilar, Stephanie Tiersch -Mouvoir, Teresa Ranieri, Marija Stamancovich, Annabelle Bonnéry and Rui Horta. With Rui Horta, among other works, he created the music for “LP” and the widely acclaimed and prized “Pixel”. In the last years he is collaborating regularly with the spanish choreographer Guillermo Weickert, with whom he co directed the also acclaimed and prized “Go With The Flow”, a dance stage adaptation of Flow, and “Life is Not (Go With Flow)”.

In 1997, his cd “Tales From Chaos” (Free Field alias) was considered one of the 10 fundamental records of all time portuguese electronic music. Flow, his latest solo cd, was on the list of Wire magazine, as one of the best electronic records of the year 2006. Until now, he has four solo releases (“Flow”, “A Rose is a Rose”, “La Strada is On Fire (And We Are All Naked)”, “Tales from Chaos”), and “de-tour” with @c, plus several other collaborations and participations in different labels, all over the world.
Live or recorded he collaborated with various artists, such as: @c, Scanner, Stephan Mathieu, Simon Fisher Turner, Pure, Phil Niblock, Colleen, Ran Slavin, Incite, Harald Sack Ziegler, Pedro Carneiro, Carlos Zíngaro, Nuno Rebelo, Ivan Franco, Sergi Jordà, Álvaro Barbosa, Rodrigo Amado, Joe Giardullo, Fried Dhän, Ulrich Mitzlaff, Carlos Santos, André Gonçalves, Nuno Moita, Rui Costa, Emídio Buchinho, Paulo Raposo, Pedro Tudela, Pedro Almeida, Gunther Heinz, o.blaat, Mahmoud Refat, Marc Behrens and Miguel Carvalhais among others.
Over the years, on most of his solo acts, Joaquim has opted to play or in the dark as a way to increase the sense of sound, or with visual artists like the long time collaborator Lia. Other visual artists that he worked with: Return, Stolen Images Inc, (Pedro Maia), Edgar Pêra, André Sier, Carsten Goertz, Nina Juric, Michael Armingeon, Phillip Rahlenbeck-KE4, Gabriel Shalom, Laetitia Morais and Mud.
He has played and toured all over Europe in performances at festivals such as Atlantic Waves 07, 05, 03 (London), Ultrasound (Huddersfield), Lem (Barcelona), La Revolution des Oreilles-Instants Chavirés (Paris), IFI (Pontevedra), Serralves em Festa (Porto), Re.actor (Genk), Festival X (Lisboa), Screen Saver (Porto), Storung (Barcelona), Clubbing (Porto), Senses (Coimbra), X Bienal de Arte (V. N. Cerveira), EME (Setúbal, Palmela), Camp05 (Montemor-o-Novo, Sttutgart), SonicScope (Lisboa), Metasonic Lx (Lisboa), Pass World (Sevilha), EXIT 07 - Capital of Culture (Luxembourg), Bang Festival (Lisboa), and institutions, art galleries and specially art oriented projects and places such as Atelierfrankfurt (Frankfurt), Fluctuating Images (Stuttgart), Differing Paths, KHM (Cologne), Weezie (Leipzig), E-Werk (Freiburg), Ausland (Berlin), Hörbar (Hamburg), KHM Nocturne Series (Cologne), ZDB (Lisboa).
He is also the producer and programmer of EME Festival (Portugal) since 2000, a festival dedicated to non-standard music and visual arts. In parallel to his own artistic work, he has been teaching and coordinating sound and audiovisuals in art schools.