Donner pay tribute to 80s ECM jazz on new single Grey Skies Over Stridsklev

Donner, an offshoot from White Willow's Jacob Holm-Lupo (also The Opium Cartel and Solstein) have paid tribute to legendary jazz label ECM on their new single Grey Skies Over Stridsklev.

The new track is taken from Donner's second album, The Van Gennep Gap, which will be released through Apollon Records on November 4. The album takes its name from the Dutch-German-French ethnographer Arnold Van Gennep, the "father of liminality". The album is a series of vignettes, chronicling impressions from various places and areas in the Grenland area of south-eastern Norway where Holm-Lupo lives.

"Grenland is not generally considered a beautiful place, even though it belongs to the Telemark County, famous for its natural beauty," Holm-Lupo explains. "But Grenland is more dominated by several small cities connected in what city planners call the 'multiple nuclei' model, with accompanying suburban sprawls, and Norway’s largest industrial park, Hærøya.

"But personally, I find the area quite magical and beautiful. In the music on this album, I’m trying to chronicle the fleeting but often powerful experiences of beauty and magic I frequently have while traveling around the area. It can be something as transient as the way sunlight hits the concrete on a street corner, or as monumental as one of the large factories at Hærøya blasting blue flames from its tall chimneys into the evening sky. The Van Gennep Gap, to me, is the inconspicuous, in-between spaces and times when that little bit of everyday magic reveals itself, and that’s what I wanted to recreate, musically."

The new album features Holm-Lupo on synths, keyboards, bass, guitar, programming and percussion, as well as guitarist Stian Larsen, who also plays with Holm-Lupo in Solstein, trumpeter Jonas Vemork Kilmøy and Kristoffer Momrak (Tusmørke, Alwanzatar) on flute.

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Writer and broadcaster Jerry Ewing is the Editor of Prog Magazine which he founded for Future Publishing in 2009. He grew up in Sydney and began his writing career in London for Metal Forces magazine in 1989. He has since written for Metal Hammer, Maxim, Vox, Stuff and Bizarre magazines, among others. He created and edited Classic Rock Magazine for Dennis Publishing in 1998 and is the author of a variety of books on both music and sport, including Wonderous Stories; A Journey Through The Landscape Of Progressive Rock.