CARDAMON (NL)

Koen Romeijn

Cardamon is a female-fronted rock/metal band from Utrecht, The Netherlands. A melancholic look on contemporary life and the everyday struggles we all face, is expressed through music which reflects these sentiments. To the members, Cardamon is about passion and professionalism. Raging guitars quieten down to emotional interludes, and vice versa. Music that, for several reasons, stays in your head, without making any concessions to both musicality and originality.

For lack of better comparison, many reviews point to bands as The Gathering, Katatonia and a Perfect Circle. As the name suggests, Cardamon is a young yet seasoned band, with its members having performed on stages across the globe, in various bands. This experience can clearly be seen on stage in their energetic live-show.

Having a world-wide release of their debut album through the UK label Femme Metal Records, Cardamon is now performing more and more across the borders of their Dutch homegrounds. The album has been very well received and scored over 80/100 in each and every magazine and webzine that reviewed it.

Koen uses monolith black Regius 6 model with several cutom options of his choice: Seymour Duncan P Rail pickups with versatile two mini switch sound control, red LED dots on 12th fret pole, his own custom inlay in red, engraved truss rod cover and Q Parts Celtic Weave knob.

In my life, I have owned as many different guitars as I have owned cars… which is a lot! Every couple years I switched between brands, but without much success. I always found myself searching for something else, something better, a guitar that would create the sounds I was looking for, an extension of myself rather than a piece of wood with strings attached to it.

I was stoked when I got the chance to get my hands on a custom Mayo Regius, but I kind of told myself not to expect too much from this guitar, to avoid being disappointed. But how wrong was I…

From the moment I first played a Mayo, I noticed that these guitars are something special, but when I opened the case of my own custom Mayo, and picked her up for the first time, I knew this was the guitar I had been searching for all those years.

The craftsmanship is evident, I’ve never seen a guitar with so much detail and a finishing this good. Everything about this guitar is simply amazing. Period. To make it my own personal Mayo Regius, I chose for a Monolith Black finish, 2 Seymour Duncan P-Rails, my own logos on the fretboard and trust-cover, and switchable red LED’s on the 12th fret. Awesome!