What happens if the sun disappears? The question lingered over the stage at Viljandi Folk Festival on the morning its closing day. Tell Your Birds brought it there, playing songs from a still unreleased record in front of a crowd for the first time. Kristīne Tukre‘s concert kokle carried the melodies, Vija Moore‘s balafon sat under them, Kärt Tambet‘s bowed hiiukannel cut across both, and everything the three of them played ran through SimoneSpampinato‘s processing. They sang in Estonian and Latvian at once, each keeping the language they grew up speaking. Some of the material comes from those same traditions, chopped up and rebuilt inside the band’s own songs. The rest belongs to no repertoire at all, written on the chance that one day it might.
Straight after the set, in the last hour before Tell Your Birds broke apart for the rest of the summer, we sat down with the four of them not far from the stage, with a temperamental recorder giving us a hard time and cutting out every few minutes. Our chat eventually fell into the band’s own working rhythm: a burst, a stop, a burst. Tukre and Spampinato live in Helsinki, Tambet in Viljandi, Moore in Riga. They get a few days together, write everything in that stretch, then go back to their own cities until the next one.
In the hour before they scattered, they talked about where a tradition comes from and what you have to know before using it, about melodies written for a time that has not happened yet, and about the syllables that decide which language a song ends up in.
Tell Your Birds started with a student project. All four met at the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki, in different departments, and Tambet dates the band from there: “We came together as a band back in 2023, but back then it was a very specific project. ItwasVija [Moore], who is our percussionist, her bachelor concert project in Sibelius Academy in Finland, where we all studied together.” The concert called for soundscape music written for one place and recorded in it, and the place Moore picked was a forest near Ērgļi, a village in Latvia. They hauled the balafon, the percussion, the violin and the kokle out among the trees and played there, birds and insects carrying on around them and ending up on the tape along with everything else. For Spampinato that set the method for everything after it: “it was the first project where we all get together and thought, we recorded everything outside. We tried to record the instruments as they were part of the soundscape in that sense.” That turned into Pause in Nature, then Carry on with Hope, out on 1 November 2024. One year later they wanted more room to move, and Tambet marks autumn 2025 as the turn: “to write together and to think of music more widely, maybe not so specifically as we had done before“. Moore had been waiting for it: “I like that with this new music, we got to put it all together.”
There was a lot to put together. The four met inside one institution and arrived there from four directions, and Moore starts with the two furthest from folk: “Simone comes from sound art, electronics, different sound design type of experience and worldview. And then Kristīne comes from a contemporary composition and contemporary kantele playing. Also, Kristīne is interested in baroque music.” She and Tambet are the two who came up in folk, she through percussion, Tambet through singing and the violin. The spread is the point for Moore: “Each of us have a different genre outlook. I think it all comes together in our music, and it’s very interesting.“
Tukre’s own route ran through the classical kantele, though her instrument at home is the kokle. The Estonian kannel, the Latvian kokle and the Finnish kantele are cousins in one family of box zithers, and the family resemblance is where it gets interesting for her: “We have a very interesting phenomenon here in the Baltics and in Finland. We have these string instruments; they’re similar, but at the same time very different. They have different names, but we, musicians, try to come together.” The players of all three look across the borders to each other’s instruments. She did exactly that, a kokle player going to Helsinki to learn the kantele at the Sibelius Academy: “That’s how I got to Finland. I got to meet Viia, Gert and Simone, and we started the band.“
Coming together now happens across three countries, which turns rehearsals and recording sessions into an exercise of dates, plans and travel tickets, so they work in blocks: several days in one of the three places, everything at once, then dispersal. For Moore the two halves stay separate: “We just intensively get into the music for those couple of days, and then go back to our real lives.” Where those blocks happen feeds the music too. “I also think us meeting for intensive times in different places has played a big role in the music. Because when we have come to Viljandi, we get to see into the Viljandi life, and we get to see into the whole Estonian culture, even social culture. It plays such a big role of explaining what a tradition means. And then also going to Latvia all together, that was the missing puzzle pieces.” Estonia, Latvia and Finland have all had their turn. Italy is still waiting, as Spampinato points out: “We have not been to Italy. What a terrible thing!” The residencies have gone further than rehearsal rooms and taken the four into each other’s family homes, which Moore counts as its own kind of source material: “In our residencies, it’s very nice that we’ve met each other’s families because families represent culture in a whole other coded way, it’s something not explainable by words.”
What comes back from those weeks is a songbook the band builds itself. Tambet traces the bulk of it to the four of them: “Most of the music is actually original music that we have composed together, or separately, but brought it to this group.” Folk melodies feed into it, and so do myths, texts and lyrics that arrive as words alone. Before using any of it, Tambet wants the origin and the original purpose clear: “there’s a lot of using a tradition in music. You have to be aware of it, and translating it to others. It’s highly important that we’re aware where it’s coming from and what the original intention behind that tradition is, so we can translate it into our own musical language.”
The traditions Spampinato grew up with are not the ones on the table. He comes from Sicily, but his folk roots lie in Ciociaria, a historical region of southern Lazio: “My folk background is actually from Ciociaria, not Sicilian.” What he brings instead comes from sound art, electronics and sound design, where the tradition is the sound itself: “My background is more about sound. What do we do with every little sound?” Put that question to folk music and you get the music he admires most: “I’m really a huge fan of experimental French folk music, Sourdure for example, and I think we are trying to get into that.” In practice it means cutting material up and putting it back together: “What we use a lot is chopping and sampling, this kind of collage, things colliding. Sometimes they’re all together, sometimes we really like the contrast.” The same goes for how the four handle it on stage, where the play is in the treatment, not the tunes: “Maybe the songs don’t seem that playful, but how we manage our material is super playful. Viia is playing with four mallets [on the balafon], I’m on the synth and then the guitar. It’s collage in that sense.“
The same collage habit carries into the lyrics, starting with language. Sometimes the four sing three languages at the same time, like a group chanting together, each in their own language instead of settling on a shared one. For Tukre, that’s the point: “We don’t make these language compromises.” The words themselves usually start from folk songs and folk tales, which she reworks before they can be sung now: “The language tends to be quite archaic and doesn’t always fit with the world we live in. So we like to shape it a little and add some reference points we can relate to, but keep the original idea our ancestors had in their folk songs.” The shaping mostly falls to her, in Spampinato’s words “the poet of the band“. A song’s meaning is often sketched in English first, but the language it ends up in is chosen by ear, and for Moore sound decides it: “We’re a lot based on the sound, so what sound are we searching for? That’s where the language plays a big role.” Syllable counts settle much of it: “Some songs require Estonian lyrics, you can just feel it fits better, and some songs are Latvian. The number of syllables each language uses for one word can be different, so we use that to our advantage. How many syllables do we need? And just the pure phonetics of it.” Their latest single, “pa saulei”, is written and sung in Latvian and takes the idea down to a single word. Saule is sun, pasaule is world, and pa saulei means following the sun. Moore sums up the trick: “If you add these little syllables before and after it, it can change the meaning.“
“pa saulei”, like everything they put out, never leaves the band’s hands. The four handle the engineering, mixing and visuals themselves, and for Spampinato that’s the most independent way to work: “We do everything by ourselves: recording, mixing, visuals. It’s holistic, even though I don’t like the word. It’s maybe the most independent thing you can do, just do everything.” The setting shifts every time. Their debut was made outdoors in Ērgļi, a village in Latvia, with the instruments caught as part of the surrounding soundscape. The follow-up, due in April 2027, moves indoors to Moore’s house and home studio: “We think we need that kind of closeness, but still the comfort.” The shift is deliberate: “I don’t know what the next album will be, probably in a spaceship. But every time we try to come up not only with new music, but with a new way of approaching it.“
That album, due in April 2027, will carry the material they played at Viljandi Folk, and a single built on a traditional Estonian horn melody comes first, this September. A short tour follows in November, with Helsinki confirmed for 20 November as part of the Global Club Nights series, then release concerts in April in Latvia, Estonia and, they hope, Helsinki again. For anyone hearing them for the first time, the band’s own introduction says it best: “Tell Your Birds is a four-person music collective of musicians from Latvia, Estonia and Italy. We play our original compositions with collages of Estonian, Latvian and Italian traditional folk melodies and archive recordings and texts.“
Tell Your Birds released "pa saulei" in June, with the album due in April 2027
and everything in between turning up on their Instagram
