Musikk fra myra: Pumpegris, Kenneth Lien & Center of the Universe, Gabba, Sofia HK

Following its debut in 2025, Musikk Fra Myra returns to Cosmopolite. On Saturday, January 16, 2027, we invite you to the festival's second edition, featuring Pumpegris, Kenneth Lien & Center of the Universe, Gabba, and Sweden's Sofia HK.

But what exactly is folk music in 2027? Is it something we should preserve exactly as it once was, or something we should continue to play with, challenge, and make our own?

Here at Cosmopolite, we've long been fascinated by musicians who refuse to let traditions stand still. And the four acts we've invited to this year's festival show just how many directions folk music can take.

Take Pumpegris, for example. A band that seems to have made it their mission to shake folk music free from every preconceived notion of what it should sound like. With Vera Sonne at the front, they move between traditional Norwegian vocal styles and rap, while traditional dance tunes, fuzz guitars, funk, and hip-hop collide. Their debut album, Fritids, produced by Tuva Syvertsen, is full of humour, sincerity, and musical mischief. And it's hard not to get swept up in it.

Kenneth Lien & Center of the Universe take us even further into this territory. What happens when Hardanger fiddles, jaw harps, and traditional folk tunes meet drum machines, house, and techno? Well, you get electro-halling, disco-gangar, and springar drum'n'bass, among other things. Kenneth Lien, known from Ævestaden, and electronic music veteran Jørgen Skjulstad have created a musical universe where it almost sounds as if Norwegian folk music has always been electronic. And perhaps that idea isn't quite as absurd as it first seems.

With Gabba, we enter the world of Sámi musical traditions. Led by joik master John André Eira from Máze, the band brings traditional joik together with Americana and folk music. They call it viddeblues, or tundra blues. Here, joik is not a nostalgic look back at the past, but a living part of the music, passed down through generations and carried into a sound that is both grounded and exploratory.

From Sweden comes Sofia HK, who perhaps represents the festival's most introspective side. Her music moves somewhere between folk, singer-songwriter traditions, and contemporary songwriting, with lyrics exploring belonging, exclusion, love, and the longing to both leave home and return to it. Following a critically acclaimed debut in 2026 and a tour with The Tallest Man On Earth, she now comes to Cosmopolite with music that reminds us that folk music doesn't necessarily have to tell stories from long ago. It can just as easily capture what it means to be young and searching for your place in the world right now.

Four acts that, on paper, might not seem to have much in common. Yet there's a connection between them. Each carries something from the music that came before, while insisting on making it their own.

And perhaps that's exactly what we want to explore with Musikk Fra Myra. Not just where folk music comes from, but where it's heading.

We hope you'll join us down in the bog on January 16. We have a feeling things are going to get pretty lively down there.

Musikk Fra Myra is organised in collaboration with FKP Scorpio.