various different art medias into his musical compositions. He also takes deep interest in revealing the inherent relation between contemporary and "ethnic" musics, having collaborated with traditional musicians from Turkey and Japan, and toured in China with reinterpreted traditional Chinese music.
Increasingly, Badenhorst is contemplating the evanescent site specificity of sound as well as the relation between space and sound. He is also delving into a re-imagination of the boundaries between improvisation and composition, of abstract sound explorations and harmonic passage, and continues to attempt at a personal aesthetic language that interact with different spaces and engage with different audiences.
Joachim Badenhorst is the artistic director of several ensembles in Europe and the U.S. He is the composer and arranger for the seven-piece ensemble Carate Urio Orchestra, the Icelandic Quintet Mógil (with Icelandic folk texts and poetry) and the acoustic chamber new music trio Baloni.
Badenhorst is a member of several groups led by world renowned musicians such as the Han Bennink Trio, Tony Malaby's Novela, Fumio Yasuda group and Kris Davis' Infrasound.
Since 2010, Badenhorst has been developing his solo program consisting of improvisations and compositions for solo acoustic and electro-acoustic wind instruments.
Badenhorst released three critically acclaimed solo albums: 'The Jungle He Told Me' (Smeraldina-Rima 2012), 'Forest//Mori' (Klein 2014) and ‘Kitakata’ (Santé-Loisirs 2016), ‘Typhoon Days’ (Klein 2018).
Badenhorst was invited by the Flemish government as representing artist-in- residence in the Comacina Island in Italy (2012) and the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris (2013). He has received invitations to curate music festivals, and has been artists-in-residence at Dommelhof Neerpelt (2014), Brand! Festival (2015) in Belgium, Ftarri in Tokyo, Japan (2015) and Permeke Library, Antwerp (2018).
Joachim appears on over 50 cd's on internationally acclaimed record labels and founded his own record label KLEIN in 2013.
In 2016, Badenhorst started collaborating with the renowned German record label Winter&Winter. Since then he was featured on 4 W&W albums and performed with label boss Stefan Winter’s Poem of a Cell sound installation in Spain, Israel, France and Japan.
Badenhorst was chosen as one of the Rising Star Clarinet of 2013, 2017, 2018, 2019 in the Annual Downbeat Critic's Poll (USA), and was chosen Clarinet Player of the years 2011, 2013 and 2015 by international jazz critics in the Annual Intruso Critics Poll (Argentina).