A riddle in Old English, sung with a hoarse heavy metal voice to the accompaniment of an electric guitar: You have to come up with this idea first.

The number can be found on Youtube if you search for “old english riddle songs” - there are now several episodes.

It is not performed by a rocker, but by a singer trained at the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis, a top institute for early music.

Tangled long hair, a terrifying gas mask in front of your face and a cute little dog next to you on the sofa - the irony of the staging is perfect.

Hanna Marti, that's the name of the singer, together with her colleague Stef Conner, who is also trained in early music, produced around a dozen such short videos in the Corona year 2020 in order to creatively shorten the miserable time of forced idleness. In the credits it says: "In tempore pestilentiae MMXX" - in times of the plague 2020.

The texts are riddles from the "Exeter Book", an important source of Old English literature from the tenth century. The compositions come from the two musicians themselves. Depending on the location, they produced the songs at their homes in private surroundings. Singing and accompaniment were recorded alternately in Basel and Cambridge, the coordination took place via the Internet, and at the end the audiovisual material was assembled - in-house production through Learning by Doing, as the duo assures. Artistic singing, voiced cleanly, combines with the sound of the medieval harp and the African mbira, but also with all kinds of kitchen utensils as percussion instruments or with minimalist tone sequences on the electronic organ.

In the clever simplicity of the presentation, the wealth of musical variations and the playful use of the medium of video, there is a professional access to the artistic material, which turns the incidentally created videos into small audio-visual works of art. They reveal the handwriting of a type of musician who is composer, interpreter and scenic performer in one and who also takes the medial communication into his own hands. In the pop business, as in some experimental fringe areas, this is everyday life today, but so far it has seldom been found in early music. An unexpected form of crossing borders, which contributes significantly to the great appeal of the miniatures.