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The origins of WSPAK take us to the colourful Podlasie region, where the duo was founded in 2018 by two friends and Białystok natives, Adrianna (Ada) Maria Kafel-Woźniak and Aleksandra (Ola) Pura-Cidyło. But their music-making together began much earlier, around 2006, when they were still in junior high school. Exploring music together and a similar sensitivity encouraged the girls to create their own original arrangements of familiar eastern-borderland songs. Their selected repertoire was often performed at Ola’s family home, where borderland folk reigned alongside Orthodox Church music. Her ancestors spoke “their own language”, meaning the language of the locals living in the villages around Zabłudów. This music together with the language was preserved in daily family life and during gatherings of family and friends. That’s why the pronunciation in the pieces arranged by the duo is authentic, typical of the people living in an area that 19th-century Polish ethnographer Oskar Kolberg called “Ruthenian Podlasie”. Lemko songs also appeared there, and – thanks to their melodiousness and a language similar to Ukrainian – became part of the borderland population’s repertoire. Today the duo is exploring even closer connections with Lemko folklore. It so happens that choosing their husbands, they married into Lemko families and into traditions that they intend to cultivate.