This summer, Estonian folk band Duo Ruut released their album "Ilmateade" ("The Weather Report"), which took them to several major festivals and was even acclaimed by The Guardian.

Kivi's bandmate Ann-Lisett Rebane recalled that when they formed ten years ago, they were only 15 years old.

"We were hiking somewhere in the woods and thought that if we were going to play our ukuleles on the street, we should have a band name, so we thought of Ruut, which is easy to remember. Actually, due to a mistake, it became Duo Ruut, and then we just left the 'duo' in front of it," Rebane said.

"I think it happens to all bands that the name is misspelled on the door of their dressing room. We were playing in a competition for young folk bands in Viljandi, and we went to our backstage room, where it said 'Duo Ruut' instead of 'Ruut.' We thought that since Rüüt already exists, we decided not to tell anyone that the name was spelled wrong and to change our name ourselves instead," she explained.

While they formed a decade ago, they only introduced their signature instrument – the kannel or zither – around eight years ago.

"We found it by chance in the corner of our rehearsal room, covered in dust. We picked it up half jokingly and half out of desperation, because we had less than a week left before a competition we had signed up for and had to perform something. We were struggling to come up with any ideas with the instruments we were using at the time," said Katariina Kivi.

Rebane pointed out that a similar approach – two musicians behind a single instrument – is done here and there, but usually with different instruments. "We found a little trick in music, that it's easy to be the best at something when you're the only one doing it. We invented our own category and we're the only ones in it, which means we're the best and the worst at the same time," she laughed.

Although the international media often points out the connections between Duo Ruut's music and nature album to nature, they themselves did not seek those links.

"Rather, these nature and weather themes came to our album on their own. When we were planning to write the album, we wanted to write about growing up and becoming big, but then the album wrote itself into something completely different," Rebane said.

According to Kivi, it is tricky to explain to people who have not heard their music yet. "I always want to show them first, because it doesn't sound very attractive when you say that the two of us play the zither and sing Estonian folk songs," she said, adding that they actually write quite a lot of their own music now.

"We use words from Estonian folk poetry or traditional sayings, and sometimes folk tunes, but the music we write is mostly our own."

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