Jo Berger Myhre Penta (Red Marble)

Norwegian bassist, composer and producer Jo Berger Myhre continues his exploration of uncanny sonic landscapes with Penta, his third album for RareNoise Records, to be released on May 15th, 2026. The new studio work follows the critically acclaimed Unheimlich Manoeuvre (2021) and the live document Live Manoeuvres (2025), completing a creative arc that began with solo bass experiments and evolved through years of live performance.
Over the past decade Myhre has established himself as a distinctive voice in contemporary Nordic music, moving fluidly between projects ranging from the electro-acoustic trio Splashgirl to collaborations with artists such as Nils Petter Molvær, Ólafur Björn Ólafsson of Sigur Rós, Mariam The Believer, Jenny Hval & Susanna, Geir Sundstøl and the ensemble Finland.
With Penta, he refines the musical language that emerged from Unheimlich Manoeuvre and matured on stage during the extensive touring that followed.
The album features the same quartet that brought that music to life in concert: Morten Qvenild on piano and synthesizers, Kaveh Mahmudiyan on Iranian percussion instruments tombak and daf, and Jo David Meyer Lysne on acoustic guitars, resonating strings and self-made motorised installations. The deep musical understanding developed through years of performances together informs every moment of Penta, resulting in an ensemble sound that balances precision, openness and improvisational energy.
At the centre of the music remains Myhre’s highly distinctive bass language. On Penta he again employs the double bass largely with a bow—often a kamancheh bow, an approach shaped during his studies in Iran with master musician Zhubin Kalhor. A new colour in his instrumental palette appears here as well: a vintage Hagström 8-string bass guitar, a rare hybrid instrument most famously associated with Noel Redding in the late 1960s. Myhre reimagines the instrument entirely, treating it less as a bass and more as a finger-picked, chordal guitar voice intricately intertwined with Mahmudiyan’s detailed percussion work. Their close interaction, further developed while composing music for the theatre production "Baqorban" reaches a striking expression in the album’s second track, Augmentations in G flat.
Inspired by the insights gained from performing Unheimlich Manoeuvre live, Myhre composed the music for Penta specifically for this ensemble. The seven pieces combine clearly defined compositional frameworks with carefully preserved spaces for improvisation, allowing the quartet’s collective chemistry to unfold naturally. The result is a suite that merges layered arrangements, organic interplay and subtle studio craft, highlighting Myhre’s unique ability to merge compositional thinking with sonic experimentation.
Penta was recorded over three days at Amper Tone Studio in Oslo with engineer Johnny Skalleberg. Myhre later brought the recordings back to his own studio, where he carried out editing, additional overdubs and the final mix. Soprano Synnøve Sætre Hveem appears on Augmentations in G flat, adding a luminous vocal line that cuts through the ensemble texture.
Where the earlier albums often revolved around slowly unfolding drone structures, Penta moves into new terrain. Myhre draws particular inspiration from the musical language of Olivier Messiaen, incorporating altered scales, unusual harmonic progressions and asymmetric rhythmic cycles. These elements contribute to the distinctive atmosphere that has become one of Myhre’s trademarks: music that feels simultaneously rooted and mysterious, familiar yet strangely disquieting. Throughout the album he continues to explore thematic dualities, such as light and darkness, beauty and danger, the earthly and the esoteric.
For the first time in his RareNoise catalogue, Myhre has also chosen titles that foreground the musical structure itself rather than evoking specific emotional states. While subtle references remain (Abyss in B flat minor, for instance, doubles as an homage to the Norwegian shoegaze band Serena Maneesh), the emphasis lies on the music’s internal architecture.
The album title Penta reflects this focus. It refers to the recurring use of the number five in different musical forms across the record—sometimes explicit in metre or phrasing, sometimes hidden within harmonic or structural patterns for attentive listeners to discover.
With Penta, Jo Berger Myhre deepens the sonic world first introduced with Unheimlich Manoeuvre while opening new compositional pathways. It is a record shaped equally by years of live performance, by cross-cultural musical encounters and by a restless curiosity for sound itself: it is an album where careful design and spontaneous interaction coexist in a constantly shifting musical landscape.