Julio Torres
Julio Torres was born in Morelia (Mexico). He started his musical studies at the Conservatorio de las Rosas in his hometown. After completing his basic training he moves to Victoria, BC for a couple of years. But it’s in Vancouver where he would finally find fertile soil for his musical ideas, earning a BFA in Music Composition at Simon Fraser University. It is here where he began to develop an “ear” for music, expanding his sonic ideas into the realms of cinema, dance, theater, and experimenting with live electroacoustic processes and extended technics on different instruments.
His works have been performed in Canada by the likes of Peggy Lee, Mark McGregor, Gordon Grdina, Daniel Tones, The Phoenix Chamber Choir, and the Hermes String Quartet in Victoria/Vancouver BC. In 2008, his piece “Oneiric Luminescence” for full orchestra was included in the Jean Cloulthard Readings of the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra.
After finishing school, he became more interested on improvisation and improvised music and started to developed the “Kaleidoscopic” pieces, a series of freely written pieces of music that encapsulate relatively short musical motifs in an open form… Thus, leaving many of the final decisions to the performers. In these pieces, the concept of time and pulse is relative and ever changing… The performer could speed up or down, as well as change the duration of every single note. In addition, the performer is free to choose not only the order of the motifs but also articulation, dynamics, and other elements that are left to chance. The first “Kaleidoscope” was premiered in 2010 at the Sonic Boom Music Festival in Vancouver. Later on in Mexico, Julian Martinez premiered his “Kaleidoscope No. 2” for solo violin, while the third Kaleidoscope was recorded by cellist Maria Lipkau as music score for the film “Las Letras” by Pablo Chavarria.
All of these elements -improvisation, free form/free tempo-pulse, extended technics, etc… - converge in his latest musical project, ChaTo: An experimental rock based duo with filmmaker/drummer Pablo Chavarria. With ChaTo, the composer undertakes a journey into unknown territories where elements of jazz, punk, rock, and noise can coexist only to be forged into something of its own species. Consequently with the nature of the project, all of ChaTo’s releases have been live recordings worked as a series of pieces that reflect the influence that the band have from musical and non-musical elements such as the performing space or the crowd to the changes in tempo and/or rhythm, or even the weather…
Julio Torres lives in San Cristobal de Las Casas, Chiapas.