The Storm - Ballroom Quartet

The Ballroomquartet was set up in autumn 2001. After only a handful of performances the band wins the musical contest Rockvonk 2002. The mini-album Ballroom on the Rocks (2002) and the single Death Valley (2003) set the ball rolling. The quartet performs at the Ancienne Belgique, a famous concert hall in Brussels, and is featured at e.g. Brosella, Dranouter, Fonnefeesten, Marktrock and Plazey. In 2004 the band launches its first full-CD Surfing Sufi. The recording was done by Red Tape Studio-duo ‘Monsieur Paul’ (Triggerfinger) and Filip Goris. The press were almost unanimously laudatory about the album : Surfing Sufi harvests good write-ups aswell in Belgian as in Dutch newspapers and magazines like for instance Oor, Knack, De Morgen, De Standaard, Rifraf, fRoots and Stage. The band is not short of airplay either and the filmic qualities of the boys’ music did not pass unnoticed with television makers. Several compilations – like for instance by Poppunt and Klara – feature the group as soon as in 2002.

The rather unusual combination of instruments and influences endowes The Ballroomquartet with one of the most original sounds in Belgium. These citizens of the world of music blend loads of exotic sonorities into their repertoire. The sound of their acoustic instruments – accordion, mandolin, violin, double-bass and drums – is distorted in every possible way thus producing a cinemascopic mixture of dance, trance, eastern world music, roots and rock. Effects, synthesizers, vocoders and all sorts of electronical devices endow their tunes with a contemporary and sometimes even experimental personality.

The members of The Ballroomquartet Andries Boone (mandolin, violin and guitar), Rony Deprins (accordion, synths, vocals), Jasper Hautekiet (double-bass and electrical bass) and David Vertongen (drums, percussion, samples). The boys also had the opportunity to work together with artists like e.g. Guy Swinnen, Will Tura, P. Vansant, Yasmine, Monza, Steven Debruyn & The Rhythm Junks and the Korean percussionist Yung Yung Lee. The wide diversity of influences result in an unheard musical cross-breeding that could be localised somewhere between the London suburbs and the Hindu Kush mountains of Afghanistan.

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