Ballroomquartet

The Ballroomquartet was set up in 2001. In December 2009 they released their third full-album which was produced by Blixa Bargeld from Einstürzende Neubauten & Nick Cave. The press were almost unanimously laudatory about their work. The albums ‘Surfing Sufi’, ‘Soundmanifest’ & ‘Ballroomquartet’ harvested excellent reviews predominantly in the Belgian, Dutch and German newspapers & magazines. The band is not short of airplay and the filmic qualities of their music is regularly called upon for television and documentary film-makers. Their third album forced a breakthrough in the Belgian music scene and brought the band high profile festivals dates in Belgium, The Netherlands, Germany and France.
The rather unusual combination of instruments and influences endows The Ballroomquartet with one of the most original sounds in Belgium. The sound of their acoustic instruments – accordion, mandolin, violin, electric 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 electronic devices inhabit their tunes with a contemporary and often experimental personality. The members of The Ballroomquartet are Andries Boone (mandolin, violin, bulbul-tarang and voices), Rony Deprins (accordion, synths, theremin, vocoder and voices), Michaël Donckers (electric bass and clarinet) and Geert Mariën (drums & percussion).
The wide diversity of influences result in a unique musical cross-over that could be localised somewhere between the London suburbs
and the Hindu Kush mountains of Afghanistan. Without any doubt The Ballroomquartet has one of the most eclectic, original and innovative sounds. David Bowie considers himself a fan of their work and doesn’t hesitate to mention their name in interviews. In October 2008 the band was invited by the famous French composer Yann Tiersen to play at the concerthall ‘La Cigale’ in Paris at the Montmartre Filmfestival. In the Summer of 2010 they performed @ Les Ardentes Liège & The Folk and Roots Festival @ Rudolstadt in Germany.