All Of Them Witches

Hedvig Mollestad Thomassen is a guitar heroine for our times. Born in the Norwegian town of Ålesund in the early 80s, she first picked up her mother’s nylon-strung acoustic guitar at the age of ten.

As an exploratory teenager she dug deep into her father’s jazz and rock record collection and translated a biography of Jimi Hendrix for a school project. Then she was given an electric guitar and amplifier as a confirmation present, and never looked back.

But there’s nothing pious about her music. Her molten, overdriven guitar sound is forged in the same fiery furnace as Hendrix, Tony Iommi, Jimmy Page, then plunged into a steaming vat of free jazz in the Sonny Sharrock/Fred Frith mould.