Hedvig Mollestad Trio
It’s not jazz rock and it’s not rock jazz. It’s the Hedvig Mollestad Trio.
“I think we’re a little bit like Rush, in their musicality and treating each other with respect.” Hedvig Mollestad Thomassen
If you’re a fan of boundary-pushing, genre-shredding music (and as a reader of Prog, that goes without saying), then you can’t have failed to notice the astonishing stream of bands that Norway has produced over the past 10 years, many of them released by the Rune Grammofon label. Initially spearheaded by norsk rock stalwarts Motorpsycho, and quickly followed by the likes of Bushman’s Revenge, Elephant9, Fire! and Krokofant, a loosely affiliated scene has developed that mixes jazz, prog, metal and psychedelia to create a new type of challenging but accessible avant-rock.
Yet as the promo blurb for their latest album says, it could very well be Hedvig Mollestad Trio that ultimately define this scene. Smells Funny is their fifth album in eight years, and quite possibly their best yet. Consisting of Hedvig Mollestad Thomassen on guitar, Ellen Brekken on bass and Ivar Loe Bjørnstad on
drums, the music they make is a deliriously exciting mash-up of 70s-style hard rock and jazz, monolithic riffing combined with lithe instrumental interplay. Imagine Black Sabbath jamming with Mahavishnu Orchestra while Robert Fripp looks on approvingly. If you haven’t investigated them before, now is a very good time to do so.
The Trio see themselves primarily as a live band, but Smells Funny does a good job of capturing their on stage energy and musical telepathy. The secret is being well-prepared, as Mollestad explains: “We work really hard before we go in the studio. We build these pieces of music and then turn them inside out. We try them in different meters and with different dynamics or tempos. We even change the tunings and the keys to make them sound right. Even so, they change when we record in the studio, because our attitude changes. We’re pushed more there. So yes, we’re a live band, but we need the studio to make new material, because we get tired of playing the old stuff!”
However, there’s still plenty of room for improvisation. Talking down the phone from Oslo, Mollestad and Brekken gleefully recall the spontaneous recording of the album’s final track, Lucidness, a pounding avalanche of noise out of which Mollestad’s guitar spirals upwards towards the light. “I was eyeballing Ivar thinking, ‘What the fuck is he going to do?’” she says. “I was ready to do something nimble, but then just threw it away!” adds Brekken, who audibly dives into the maelstrom despite her bass dropping out of the mix halfway through. “When I took off my headphones, Hedvig said, ‘I think this is the take!’”
One of the defining elements of the Trio’s music is this contrast between technical precision and a looser, more exploratory vibe. For example, Brekken might play a complex run that Mollestad weaves around like fire, while Bjørnstad lays down a beat that both drives and swings. This sense of dynamic tension is immediately apparent on the album’s opening salvo of tracks, Beastie, Beastie’s crunching homage to the Beastie Boys’ Sabotage and the King Crimson-esque powertrain of First Thing To Pop Is The Eye.
“It’s fun to play Beastie, Beastie in unison as a riff, with Ellen playing bass the same way as the guitar, with pull-offs on the e-string hard on the beat,” says Mollestad. “But with First Thing To Pop…, there are so many notes in the bottom end with the bass and drums, I have to work with sounds rather than play anything tricky or metric, that would be too much! We like to work with different layers in the music.”
The Trio operate as a purely instrumental band, but Prog wonders if any of their material is inspired by specific concepts or reflects what’s happening in the world? “Some songs start as an idea, I have a feeling of what it’s going to be about,” says Mollestad. “On [second album] All Of Them Witches, there’s a song called Code Of Hammurabi, which is about the witches being burnt. I really tried to visualise that, get in the mood about the
seriousness of it, and draw a line to those souls who are treated the same way today.”
Brekken says, “On Black Stabat Mater [2016], we had one political idea behind all the titles.” Mollestad continues, “There were a lot of refugees coming to Norway at the time, and the government didn’t know how to handle it. They were afraid there were going to be too many, so they didn’t have very open arms. They gathered the refugees at night in buses and sent them across the border to Russia. The weather forecast was minus 40 degrees. Approaching and On Arrival try to make sense of how that feels, and Somebody Else Should Be On That Bus [refers to] our Minister of Integration at the time.”
The current album’s title is a reference to Frank Zappa’s quote, “Jazz isn’t dead. It just smells funny.” “We wanted to find a title that was striking, but not pretentious,” says Mollestad. “It’s not about jazz dying, because it’s absolutely still alive, but it’s something else from what it used to be.” Brekken adds, “Though we don’t really care about this discussion. People try to label us, jazz with rock or rock with jazz, but this is just something that smells funny, it’s a mix of so much different stuff.”
The Trio first met and started playing together at the Norwegian
Academy Of Music in Oslo, having all previously studied music as part of Norway’s ‘folk high school’ gap year system (a possible reason why the country produces so many talented young bands). Mollestad’s father was a jazz musician, and she took up guitar from the age of 10; Brekken played tuba in a marching band before discovering AC/DC and her uncle’s Fender Precision bass; and Bjørnstad’s upbringing was evidently arts-focused too, his sisters Ingebjørg and Marit being a singer and dancer respectively.
Brekken describes the Trio as a particularly close-knit group: “I don’t think I know anybody better than Hedvig and Ivar other than my mum and dad! When we haven’t been together for a while, I feel kind of naked… I think our egos are pretty well-balanced as a trio.” Mollestad agrees: “Three people are easier to manage, because there’s always a majority. I think we’re a little bit like Rush, in their musicality and treating each other with respect. We try to be rock stars, but we aren’t! We don’t succeed, but we’re friends!”
One topic that tries their patience though is the media’s focus on the Trio as being two-thirds female. “It’s very misleading to talk about gender when you talk about music, because it suggests that females have these certain kinds of qualities, which obviously we don’t,” says Mollestad. “If gender is important in performing arts, why aren’t guys asked what it’s like to be a man playing music? Guys can go through a lifetime of being a musicians, and treated as artists, without having this gender thing. But it’s hard for us to avoid it.”
The Trio’s profile is growing both locally and internationally, with regular live work as both headliner and support act. When they last played in the UK in 2014, it was at the Royal Festival Hall opening for their hero,
John McLaughlin – “with balconies and people sitting down, you know?” remembers Mollestad. The good news is that the Trio are touring Europe this September and hope to play at least one date in London.
While their gigs have traditionally been split between rock clubs and more sedate jazz venues, they definitely have a preference for the former. Says Brekken: “People have to be standing up, so you can touch them with your hands and make a connection.”
Mollestad adds: “The best thing is to be able to smell the audience!” “And they have to smell us as well,” says Brekken, “and we usually smell quite bad!”
Smells Funny is out now via Rune Grammofon.
See www.facebook.com/ HedvigMollestadTrio
for more information.
“If gender is important in performing arts, why aren’t guys asked what it’s like to be a man playing music? Guys can go through a lifetime of being a musicians, and treated as artists, without having this gender thing. But it’s hard for us to avoid it.” Hedvig Mollestad Thomassen