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)
Laptop experimentalist, sound and visual artist, teacher, web activist. Graduated in Sound and Film Directing.
He started performing music and working with contemporary dance by the mid 80's. Since then, he has created extensively for dance, theater, video, installations and cross media platforms. Collaborations with collectives and creators such as Mark Haim, Coogan Dancers, Vera Mantero, Errequeerre, Paulo Ribeiro, Annabelle Bonnery, Mouvoir - Stephanie Thiersch, La Macana, Guillermo Weickert and Rui Horta. With Rui Horta he created the music for LP and the widely acclaimed and prized Pixel, among other works. With the Spanish choreographer Guillermo Weickert, he directed the also acclaimed and prized Go With The Flow, a dance stage adaptation of Flow.
In 1997, the cd Tales From Chaos (under the alias Free Field) was considered one of the 10 records of Portuguese electronic music of all times, and Flow cd, was listed by the Wire magazine as one of the best electronic records of the year 2006. He collaborated with many international artists, such as @c, Scanner, Stephan Mathieu, Simon Fisher Turner, Phil Niblock, Carlos Zíngaro, Colleen, Pure, Sergi Jordà, Marc Behrens, o.blaat, Ran Slavin, and Greg Haines.
Over the years, on most of his solo acts, Joaquim opted to play or in total darkness, as a way to increase the sense of sound, or with visual artists such as the long time collaborators Lia, Hugo Olim, Carsten Goertz, and Laetitia Moraes. Even though he loves to play solo, it's in the electronic real time collaborations and live sampling that Joaquim is been mostly involved in the last decade while playing live and touring all over Europe, in music and dance performances at festivals such as Atlantic Waves, IFI, Ultrasound, Lem, CocArt, Madeiradig, Storung, Artech, Intr:Muros, Mes de Danza, MU.DA., on performances and presentations in places such as Spitz (UK), MC2 (Grenoble), Mercat dels Flors (Barcelona), I.C.A. (UK), NRW (Dusseldorf), O Espaço do Tempo (Montemor-o-Novo), Teatro Central (Sevilla) Instants Chavirés (Paris), Casa Encendida (Madrid), and KHM (Cologne). In Portugal he has presented work in virtually all the regular places for experimental art: ZDB, CCB, Culturgest, Gulbenkian Foundation, Serralves Foundation, and Casa da Musica.
Simultaneously to his own artistic work on sound and music, he directed a few pieces in contemporary performance, video art and video mapping, and has been invited to advise programmers and curators in several festivals and events in Europe. From 2000 to 2009, he produced his own festival EME, an event dedicated to experimental arts and non-standard music.
At the moment, he is a researcher in computer music at CITAR, the Research Center for Science and Technology in Art at UCP, Porto, where he is also a teacher.
