Mollestad loves a legend, and Ekidna conjures the spirit not of the cute spiny anteater, but of the mythic mater, half-woman, half-snake, that was the progenitor of a hellish brood including the Hydra, Cerberus and the Sphinx. So beware, as Mollestad a mother who has delivered the heaviest of guitar while magnificently pregnant and knows the blood, bone and power of making new life, explores the uneasy relationship between nature and humankind.

Commissioned by the Vossajazz festival, Mollestad immediately visioned something different from the powerhouse trio she's most associated with. First up: no bass. With Ellen Brekken's ‘elbows out’ attack unavailable for this session, Mollestad simply couldn't imagine playing with another bassist. So there ain't one.

Instead, there's a gallimauphry of analogue keyboards nested with Mofiell's rainforest of percussion. This partly summons the keyboard colours and loose grooves of In a Silent Way, no surprise as Mollestad is an unapologetic Mclaughlin devotee. And indeed there's fierce trumpet from the alluringly alliterative Susana Santos Silva, but her fiery tone couldn't be further from a Milesian cool.

All this leaves Mollestad the guitar player freer to propel her massive riffs over a sea of sounds, as on ‘A Stone's Throw’ or to climax over and again on the rage of ‘Antilone’. The title track too is effulgent with one of her lightning bolt riffs, offset by a plaintive horn figure before it all goes epic above a groundswell of crunching keys and hellacious percussion.

One Mutha of an album.