Habla de mi en presente

“Rumba!” and we’re all thinking about the sun in Cuba, the beaches in Barcelona, couples with tender tanned skin dancing under the sky. But what if Rumba happened in cold and grey Berlin at the beginning of the 21st Century? In winter of 2012, Pau Balaguer i Banyó moved from his hometown Barcelona to Berlin. The only thing he brought with him was his “ventilator”. The ventilator is a special way to play the guitar, which produces Rumba. He used the ventilator over and over again and the city smiled at his obstinacy to try making it smile. Then he met Max Grosse Majench, a child of everywhere, who liked his ventilator a lot and started to sing in all the languages he knows. Slowly, Pau understood that techno-music was a hard competitor. He asked a young romantic German student of philosophy, Jonathan Hamann, to hit a cajón to the rhythm of his ventilator. Eventually, they all met a lost french violinist, Rémi Pradère, who started to make verses in the air with his bow. All together they started to play in the bars, in the streets and in the subways of the German capital. They called themselves “Habla de mí en presente”, which means “speak of me in the present tense.” At last, it got a bit warmer on the shore of the Spree and the city was truly laughing and dancing to the sound of this particular Rumba.