Joan Arnau Pàmies

Joan Arnau Pàmies website

All Projects with Videos

• projects as a composer •

Joan Arnau Pàmies presents a collection of pieces that explore the boundaries between composition, improvisation, and experimentation. These works belong to his upcoming album released in April 2025. This music constitutes a new stage in Pàmies's artistic career, which is marked by constant research and a unique capacity for stylistic synthesis.
Pàmies combines elements of ambient, classical music, sound experimentation, and jazz, creating soundscapes that invite the listener to an introspective and transformative experience. Here improvisation plays an essential role: each piece arises from a predetermined idea, but develops spontaneously, establishing a living dialogue with the present moment.
This show is a unique opportunity to delve into the universe of Pàmies, where the boundaries between genres and traditions are diluted to give rise to music that is deeply personal and connected to the times we live in.
Teaser Live 2025
AN+RS
Landscape II
Persistència

"compositions shaped by precision and freedom of expression"
- Headphone Commute

"a dramatic cinematic heft that is deeply woven into its sonic fabric of hope."
- We All Want Someone To Shout For

"where deep harmony meets simple yet expressive emotionality"
- Music Dances When You Sleep

"takes a variety of approaches on a single album, from jazz to pop to modern composition, acoustic to electronic, instrumental to vocal."
- A Closer Listen

"I could listen to tracks like this for hours and hours."
- Beat Radar

"Meditations and Improvisations" combines original compositions, improvisations, and a handful of reinterpretations of jazz standards. Homenatge a Cecil Taylor - live at Cafè del Teatre de l'Escorxador, Lleida on 11-11-2018
Johnny Green: "Body and Soul" (arr. Joan Arnau Pàmies) - live at Cafè del Teatre de l'Escorxador, Lleida on 11-11-2018

Original music based on ambient, techno, and experimental electronics.
Inlet Industry - PIERCER - Cafè del Teatre, Lleida on 6.2.2022
Inlet Industry - Residual Framework - Cafè del Teatre, Lleida on 6.2.2022

Original music based on global warming.
Excerpts from "escalfament/piano+orquestra" - live at "Auditori Josep Carreras"

• projects as a co-leader •

Des de la Profunditat is an electro-acoustic duo created by composers and musicians Aruán Ortiz (Cuba) and Joan Arnau Pàmies (Spain), focused on raising awareness of the impact of global warming with an A/V experience (music, light and video) as the central conduit to embark the audience in a unique journey. Through a series of musical reflections around some of the most serious consequences of climate change: sea level rise, floods, droughts, and extreme temperatures, the Ortiz and Pàmies collaboration looks forward to generating an immersive audio-visual experience that explains the need to immediately change the behavior of humans towards the planet and the other species that inhabit it.
Celebrating the legacy of the great Ryuichi Sakamoto & Alva Noto duo, this project arises from the electro-acoustic and experimental vocabulary of the second half of the 20th century and the first decades of the XXI, with examples such as John Cage, "Drukqs" by Aphex Twin and "Obsolete Systems" by Laurie Spiegel. The album was released on May 2024.
Presentation at Proto Material Records
Video Excerpts - live at L'Intèrpret, Lleida on 17-12-2022

• short biography •

Joan Arnau Pàmies is a composer, a multi-instrumentalist, a performing artist, and a record producer.
He is the founder of Protomaterial Records.

Pàmies's career spans fifteen years of highly diverse work, which encompasses live electronics, music for acoustic instruments, unusual forms of music notation, electroacoustic pieces and free improvisation on multiple instruments. An artist who unhesitatingly walks uncharted aesthetic paths, Pàmies has never been comfortable working within the boundaries of specific musical genres and traditions. For him, music is a liberating space where elements of classical and electronic music, free jazz, modernism, noise rock and experimental music coexist and can be combined to generate unique results.

He has been featured in a wide variety of venues and festivals across the world, including Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival (United Kingdom), MATA (New York), Constellation (Chicago), Foro Internacional de Música Nueva Manuel Enríquez (Mexico), Ostrava New Music Days (Czech Republic), Darmstädter Ferienkurse (Germany), Fondazione MAST (Italy), National Museum Reina Sofía, L'Auditori and Gran Teatre del Liceu (Spain).

His debut album "Nocturnes, fantasias" (Sideband Records, 2021) was described as connecting "Stockhausen's electroacoustic music of the 50s and 60s to experimental techno" (Mundoclásico).

Press Kit

Full Biography on Pàmies webiste

Biografía adaptada en español

• quotes •

"beautiful in the Aristotelian sense of proportion and harmony"
- Albert Ferrer, Revista Musical Catalana

"chaotic and elemental yet discernibly balanced"
- Steve Smith, The New York Times

"thoughtfully intellectual and viscerally artistic"
- Paco Yáñez, Mundoclásico

"an animalistic freak-out"
- Daniel Hautzinger, Cleveland Classical

Full Press on Pàmies webiste

• music & work •

Albums with links

Compositions with details

• links •

Sound Cloud

Scores at Babel Scores

Protomaterial website

Instagram