Café Breakout is located in the same building used by the orchestra for its rehearsals. We sit here in the breaks, sipping tea or coffee and talking. The building is a church-based centre for social interaction, with the not-for-profit café providing support to disadvantaged children and teenagers. We have been rehearsing here for three years on a rent-free basis, which is pure luxury for us. The place is hugely important to me, because without it the Babylon Orchestra probably wouldn’t exist.

Music is not dependent on verbal language. It forges connections between people and circumvents any linguistic barriers. Which is why, at the height of the migration wave in 2016, I and Sofia Surgutschowa, the music agent, set up an orchestra with refugees. At one event we got to know pastor Jonathan Scheer. He offered us the room to rehearse in. It even had musical equipment, amplifiers, microphones, instruments! We jumped at it.

It doesn’t take long for musicians to get in touch with other people. They use their art to bridge language gaps. We see that happening, too, with refugees. Sounds loosen people up and at the same time the musicians are using their creativity to convey a cultural setting that supersedes war and displacement. With the orchestra we’re building cultural and personal bridges – and dismantling stereotypes. Even people who’ve never come into contact with Arab culture can get into the music. That’s something that comes across at the concerts we give; our very first concert was sold out. The start was delayed for half an hour while we sorted out some extra seating.

I like sitting in the café. I’m a freelance composer and musician and I need to get out a bit and switch off for a while, shut out the internet. I’m from Russia originally and people drink a lot of black tea there. The tea-drinking tradition is something I have in common with a lot of my colleagues from the Middle East. We play a mix of Arab and western sounds. We use Arab instruments like the oud, a type of lute, the ney, which is a flute, and the darbuka, a drum. The composer and musician Osama Abdulrasol from Iraq plays the Qanun, a zither, which produces what people refer to as microtones. Arab music works with nine tonal gradations. These tones give rise to a huge range of nuanced sounds; you wouldn’t be able to play the music on a piano. We often play stuff by contemporary Arab composers like MAias Alyamani from Syria and Bushra El-Turk, a British woman of Lebanese descent, who’s just made her debut at the Proms, the summer festival of classical concerts in London. Our evening in the Tischlerei features the Egyptian opera singer Gala El Hadidi singing alongside us. Funny that she’s almost a complete blank when it comes to Arab music: her training is in classical music and she sings at the Semperoper in Dresden.

Actually, it’s not just the building with the rehearsal room and the café that’s a special location for me. The entire area around the Bergmannstraße means a great deal to me. It’s where we go out for a meal or a beer or a walk after rehearsals. People from the community bring cakes round. There are even religious meetings in Persian. That’s so Kreuzberg. Our project probably wouldn’t get off the ground anywhere else.