While studying film and video production at the Massachusetts College of Art in the Studio for Interrelated Media program, JBV soon found that he took more pleasure from the creation of his soundtracks than the visuals. Some of his later film projects prominently featured many dark or totally black scenes that forced the audience to focus on the sound exclusively.
Joe Boyd Vigil's first venture into professional music production after college came about when he was hired by Turner Network Television through Bair Tracks to design several tracks of music for promos and commercial bumpers. In 1997 he was approached by Toonami to begin producing music for the revamped Toonami programming block on Cartoon Network. He continued to produce new music for the network until some time in early 2002 when he returned to Boston from Atlanta
During this phase of his career (1997-2002), he produced close to a hundred tracks for Turner, dozens of which were featured prominently on Cartoon Network during the Toonami programming block. Some were made available on the official Toonami website for download, while a CD of expanded remixes was released on the CD Toonami: Deep Space Bass in 2001.
Also, in 2003, DJ Clarknova took old, new, and unreleased Toonami tracks, several of which were JBV's, and mixed them into the 21-track Toonami: Black Hole Megamix.