Pausa by Diogo Strausz

Covid-19 stopped the human population in its tracks, blanketing fear across the globe. Picking up on the shifts of attitude and the complex conversations, internal and external, music producer Diogo Strausz wrote Pausa with the intention for it to be recorded by musicians in isolation, playing the track together despite their physical separation. Jacob Perlmutter’s accompanying visual response was to reach out to filmmakers who had already captured their cities and towns during the pandemic, creating a portrait of the world on pause, mostly from a bird’s eye view.

Written and constructed in a small apartment where the Brazilian artist lives in Paris, the composition is the result of a lonely creative process in the middle of the severe lockdown at the French capitol. The project gathered global momentum when it became collaborative, including 35 like-minded musicians, drone cinematographers, colour graders and footage researchers, all of whom were dedicated to the single goal: to collectively tell a global story.

While musicians in Brazil, France and the US recorded their instruments from home studios, cinematographers sent drone footage of their hometowns emptied by Covid-19, such as: Rio de Janeiro, Mumbai, New York, San Francisco, Berlin, Milan Tel Aviv, Athens, São Paulo, Quito and many others.

Composer Diogo Strausz says “the result of this collaboration is the approach of different points of view about the greatness of big cities, once frenetic, now empty by the pandemic that has shifted the relationship of human beings with both physical and virtual spaces.”

Diogo Strausz is a music producer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist. Living in between São Paulo and Paris and releasing music with Razor N' Tape, Far Out Records and Gout D'or Records.