Kick-off with Raphael Monsanto

guitars? You don't even know them in music these days, because that's "just such a beep, beep, beep and a thousand hi-hats the minute", Raphael Monsanto makes fun of so many contemporary music productions.The man from Curacao brought his guitar, an acoustic with electric pickup, to the open-air performance in front of the Medio Lounge that evening.

Even though he complains to his listeners that everything has rusted a little in the last months without performance, he knows how to use the guitar.On the one hand as a percussion guitar for more or less exotic and fast rhythms and as one that he makes sound like an electric one in solo passages by means of an effect device, with pulled strings and fast riffs in the high registers and other chicanes.

Above all, the guitar is the leading factor for his looper, complemented by a digital drum. The guitar sometimes appears as a bass with plucking riffs in the deep strings.

The listeners experience how Raphael Monsanto builds up each of his songs first, feeding sequence after sequence into the looper.At the latest, when he has the whole band, the complete rhythm machine, literally in the box, he puts his voice on it, if he doesn't joke with his audience for a long time.Then he creates a mood with "Heaven", "Bailando" and "La Camisa Negra".He sings passionately Dylan's "Knocking on Heavens Door", slams Johannes Oerding's "On Good Days" or slammed out of the way about the "woman who always laughs".

Wolfgang Härtel, initiator of the Bergheimer Jamsession, came today as a listener. He had seen Monsanto in one of his first appearances in the jam session. Where musicians like to play blues and rock and that likes to play loudly, Monsanto impressed him because he has the "volume control under control" on his guitar.

Others saw him last year at the Bedburg Music Mile, where he warmed up with rhythms just before midnight for many dancers, close to the stage.

On Saturday, everyone adhered to the dance ban, staying at assigned tables where "Medio Lounge" owner Uwe Schnorrenberg personally placed the guests. Monsanto took up the subject a little comedic, making it from the edge of the stage.Showed how it works: Dancing without getting up, just sitting.

"It's a pity that we can't go to the stage," Ute Klein lamented, while she was "totally happy" that "it's going to start with public performances at all."

Until the end of July, lounge boss Uwe Schnorrenberg, with the friendly support of the district town, a cash-rich sponsor and Dieter Kirchenbauer as musical advisor, will ensure that things start again in the district town.Schnorrenberg invites you to the "Cultural Summer in the Bergheimer City" according to the current requirements of the Corona Protection Ordinance.

With live music on weekends, readings by the authors of the city library or with Burghardt Thom on the theme "dogs", with game afternoons together with the city library team every Wednesday and culinary evenings with food from the Medio lounge kitchen. "Some of the guests get to know our restaurant," says Uwe Schnorrenberg.