Joachim Badenhorst - Youran 揺籃

Rocking with Youran Youran 揺籃, which means cradle in Japanese, embraces the uncertainties of the current moment while we continue to exist in the vibration of possibilities. This new project led by Joachim Badenhorst brings together a quirky group of musicians with a rich and eclectic mix of instrumentation: Tsubasa Hori on taiko and koto, Simon Jermyn on bass and guitar, Alistair Payne on trumpet, Rutger Zuydervelt on electronics, Liz Kozak on synthesizers, and Joachim on reeds and vocals. After their debut in the former Margarine factory in Rotterdam in the summer of 2023, as a commission for the festival North Sea Round Town, the group interprets Joachim's compositions with a long, slow, and metamorphic openness - the peculiar sound characteristics of the grease-smeared industrial space fully embraced. The following summer they played a new extended set of three hours, together with church organist Hayo Boerema, in the medieval Laurenskerk in Rotterdam. The recordings of these live events were reworked and merged with studio sessions by Joachim and Rutger, who then transformed them into dissected compositions - the material for their self-titled debut album. At the core of Youran lies a reflection on grief, care, and the spaces we create to carry them. The lyrical material of the album originated from a Death Café organized in Eggspace, the communal space run by Badenhorst and his wife Bei, where participants shared poems about grief, loss, and letting go. Some of these texts found their way into the music and transformed personal reflections into a collective act of listening. During their release tour last autumn, the group continues to unearth unnameable energies and merge into them - between the intensely tender and the intimately explosive, hidden in walls and structures, in the instruments and in each of us - for immersive experiences that are unique to each performance. Simultaneously heavenly and darkly turbid, the project grew from sensory-physical explorations of grand spaces, to an attempt to carve out and preserve inner space for broken-off emotions, anchored in radical corrosion - in the making. pay what you CARE We take care of each other. That is why you determine the entrance fee yourself for the second weekend of AMOK. Do you have a little more to spend? Then you help keep the threshold low for someone else. Thank you for your contribution!