While employed as a business consultant at IBM, Garrett Schwarz reached his limit with the lack of creative outlets in corporate routines and decided to channel his energies into music instead, with Balligomingo serving as the vehicle.
Raised in the Chicago suburb of Romeoville, he relocated to Minneapolis for his final year of high school, where exposure to his father's record collection sparked an early appreciation for the electronic textures of Jean Michel Jarre and Pink Floyd. At that stage, however, a music career seemed neither practical nor realistic. After earning a business degree from Arizona State University and completing further graduate coursework in the field, he took a conventional nine-to-five position in Los Angeles that provided stability yet left him restless. The atmospheric qualities of Enya, Massive Attack, and Sunscreem, along with the visceral force of Nine Inch Nails and the Prodigy, ultimately proved irresistible. In the late '90s he abandoned security to begin composing on his computer. Following a conversation with Delerium's Kristy Thirsk, he moved to Vancouver, BC, to collaborate with programmer Vic Levak, and there the distinctive exotic textures of Balligomingo emerged.
In 1999 he secured a contract with RCA Victor. Over the following year Schwarz, Levak, and Delerium's Bill Leeb and Chris Peterson refined the project's atmospheric instrumentals. Seven female vocalists from the U.S. and Canada were enlisted to convey its emotional depth. Balligomingo first surfaced publicly when "Lost" appeared on the ambient techno compilation Elevation, Vol. 3 and "Heat" was featured on Under Water, Vol. 1. The accumulated soundscapes coalesced into the debut album Beneath the Surface, issued worldwide in June 2002.
