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 hiiu kannel cut across both, and everything the three of them played ran through Simone Spampinato‘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.
Tukre’s own route ran through the classical kantele at the academy in Helsinki, 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, developed on either side of those borders from a common ancestor, with playing traditions that stayed separate for centuries. For Tukre the family resemblance is where it gets interesting: “We have a very interesting phenomenon here in the Baltics and in Finland. We have these string instruments, and they’re similar, but at the same time very different.” Coming together across that gap is what brought her over the Gulf of Finland in the first place: “they have different names, but we try to come together. And yeah, that’s how I got to Finland.”
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 coming to Latvia, 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 and families represent culture in a whole other coded way, as it’s 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. There’s also high importance in that, that we are aware where is it coming from, and what’s the original intention behind that tradition. So we are able to actually translate it into our own musical language after that translation moment.”
Tell Your Birds released "pa saulei" in June, with the album due in April 2027 and everything in between turning up on their Instagram