The new words don’t exactly trip off his tongue. “I meet my girl, she dumps me. I start to cry, my love broken,” raps 12-year-old Sali.
He isn’t quite comfortable with the verse yet, but he’s easy to understand and that’s an achievement, because he comes from Macedonia and is rapping in a foreign language for him, German.
Together with Mohammed, Rijamondo and Samet, Sali has come to practise the new song at Martin Jungck’s recording studio in the German city of Cologne.
“Can you hear the beat? A bit slower,” says Jungck, who is giving the 12 and 13-year-olds rap lessons.
The four boys live in a refugee shelter located in the same building as the studio, a former industrial facility on the edge of the city.
They wrote the words together on the theme of “broken.”
The coming together of 40-year-old studio owner and musician Jungck with the children is unusual and it could have all turned out very differently.
Around five years ago, Jungck and his team moved into part of the old building. 
But just as they were about to get down to work, having carried out extensive renovation work, the landlord gave them notice — a new tenant had been found who would take on the whole building.
They found out the rest of the details via other means.
“We read in the newspaper that a refugee shelter was being set up here. We realised that the new tenant was the government,” says Jungck.
The problem was: the musicians had already sunk quite a lot of money into their studio and they didn’t think they could do the same again.
They decided to approach the authorities and suggested there was no reason why the musicians and their recording studio couldn’t live side by side with the refugees.
They came up with a plan for how they could work together and the city authorities listened.
The Parkhaus Studio is now a showcase for the successful integration of newcomers.
The recording studio takes up one side of the building — lots of wood, cables, notebooks on the desks, with people such as a Swiss pop star, Stefanie Heinzmann, German singer-songwriter Maxim and Irish musician Rea Garvey regularly looking in.
The refugee accommodation takes up the other side of the building, home to around 110 people including lots of children and young people.
Jungck knows most of them and gives them lessons in rap, drums and guitar. 
He and his colleagues fell into their new roles.
“I wouldn’t have been the first person to say ‘I want to get involved’,” he says.
But he enjoys it and doesn’t want to take too much credit for it.
“We play football, we want to. Then there’s a foul, my foot is broken,” the boys rap.
When Sali, Mohammed, Rijamondo and Samet lose their rhythm, Jungck taps out the beat. —DPA