Donner’s second album, The Van Gennep Gap, is named after 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 multi-instrumentalist/songwriter Jacob Holm-Lupo lives.
Jacob explains: «Grenland is not generally considered a beautiful place, even though it belongs to the Telemark County, famous for its natural beauty. 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.”
Apart from Jacob, who handles synths, keyboards, bass, guitar, programming and percussion, the album features a few notable musical guests. Guitar virtuoso Stian Larsen, who also plays with Jacob in the jazz-funk group Solstein, plays lead guitar on two tracks. Trumpeter Jonas Vemork Kilmøy (Maridalen, Helene Bøksle) plays Grey Skies Over Stridsklev, a loving tribute to 1980s ECM jazz, while Kristoffer Momrak (Tusmørke, Alwanzatar) plays his inimitably serpentine flute on Rose Clouds of Hærøya.
