Bassist Spencer Zahn steps confidently into the future of electro-acoustic improvisation on People of the Dawn. His haunting debut album is a collaboration with Darkside cofounder and acid-jazz-man-about-town Dave Harrington, the “it” guy of daring new improvised music rooted in dark electronic sounds and free jazz. Zahn and Harrington complement one another strikingly well, notably on “Cyanotype” and “Avalanche,” when their interwoven synths and Zahn’s double bass suggest an entire combo leaning in and listening hard to one another amid alien landscapes. Part of the thrilling Norwegian jazz-rock scene that includes such bands you should know as Bushman’s Revenge, Elephant9 and Motorpsycho, the Hedvig Mollestad Trio up their all-instrumental avant-stoner game on Smells Funny (Rune Grammofon), their sixth album. Guitarist Hedvig Mollestad Thomassen, bassist Ellen Brekken and drummer Ivar Loe Bjørnstad blend power-trio pizzazz with high-energy, free-form jazz grooves. Ascending guitar lines reach for the insulin on “Sugar Rush Mountain,” a fast-walking bass line underpins screamer soloing on “Bewitched, Dwarfed and Defeathered” and Mollestad finds cosmic clarity above a late-‘60s wall of avant-jazz electricity on “Lucidness.”