The Red Barn & Bjørn Tomren
Biography The Red Barn & Bjørn Tomren
The Red Barn
After a year of glowing international reviews for their debut album The Red Barn, the quartet is back with a new album in 2026 – this time a collaborative project with vocalist Bjørn Tomren. The result is a musical encounter where jazz, americana, space-country, and folk music blend together into an intimate and exciting expression. In the meeting of Tomren's distinctive vocal universe and The Red Barn's open, organic soundscape, an expression emerges that
is both playful, raw, and vulnerable.
The Red Barn is a quartet that weaves together threads from jazz, folk music, and americana. The band consists of some of the region's busiest and most creative musicians, now united under the same barn roof. The project began with a shared love for the crossroads between jazz and americana and has been simmering for quite a while.
With backgrounds in jazz, folk music, and americana, the band creates a unique and captivating sound that appeals to a wide audience. With listener-friendly compositions as a foundation, the musicians easily came together, forming a musical expression characterized by playfulness, patience, and a strong focus on building the musical core idea.
The band comprises musicians Kåre Opheim, Toivo Fjose, Mathias Marstrander, and Aksel Røed. The members of The Red Barn are involved in many other musical projects and collaborate with renowned artists and bands including Sigrid Moldestad, The Real Ones, Vill Vill Vest favorites Treverket, GPO, Spidergawd, Havene, Espen Horne & Athletic Unit, Toivo Quintet, Terje Isungset, and many, many more. The four different musicians spice their creation with each of their varied expressions and an abundance of diverse experience.
Bjørn Tomren
With a talent as organic as Bjørn’s, a return to music was always inevitable – albeit via another typically surprising route. In 2007, he formed a successful yodelling duo who soon found themselves opening to A-Ha and touring the States. It was in the US that a producer took a liking to his voice, urged him to write some songs, and his debut album was born. That’s also when Steve Earle took a shine to his abilities at a songwriting camp.
Earle would be one of many to fall in deep for Bjørn’s idiosyncratic approach to alt-country music – blending more traditional sounds of the past with tales of a fantasy future to illuminate what’s going wrong in the present. His sonic palette blends country with the raw-nerved humanity of The National, the playful but profound soul of John Grant, the ambient darkness of David Sylvian and a few cinematic flourishes around the edges. There’s a lot to get lost in.
