Ave Virus

AVE VIRUS

improvisations to digital scores

In March 2020, the entire world came to a halt as the COVID-19 pandemic broke out. Countries and even whole continents imposed lockdowns, confining millions of people to their homes.
During the first and most shocking lockdown, media outlets regularly released stories (and fake news) about animals that, taking advantage of humanity’s sudden absence, were “taking over the world.”

A white doe appeared in Poland’s Podkarpacie region, hordes of hungry monkeys roamed the deserted markets of Thailand, jackals wandered the urban parks of Tel Aviv, and (as it later turned out, falsely) dolphins swam the canals of Venice.
The fantasy of a crisis — or even the end — of human dominance on Earth struck us as deeply compelling, and the scenes captured in the news felt profoundly musical. So we treated the news photographs as scores and recorded the album AVE VIRUS.

the album was recorded by the Hashtag Ensemble lineup collaborating on previous releases #WITKACY, Visegrad Songs and urb<s>core:

Marta Grzywacz: voice, piano

Ania Karpowicz: flutes

Wojciech Błażejczyk: electric guitar, bass, zithers, electronics

Krzysztof Kozłowski: synthesizers

Paweł Janas: quarter-tone accordion

more about us: www.hashtag-ensemble.org

AVE VIRUS?

The album title was taken directly from Warsaw’s public space.

On one of the Praga district tenement walls, set designer Natalia Kitamikado spotted the inscription AVE VIRUS, and her perceptive and witty observation resonated with the album’s theme.

Borrowing this call from a Warsaw street and harnessing the pandemic-forced shift of discourse to social media, we chose the private format of an Instagram “story” as the title of the entire project.