Earlier this month, Lou Turner (aka Lauren Turner) released her sophomore album, Songs For John Venn. As the title suggests, the record is in part inspired by mathematician and philosopher John Venn, after whom the Venn diagram was named. When researching his life, Turner discovered parallels between Venn (a son of strict Evangelicals and one-time Anglican priest who eventually disavowed the faith) and her own religious upbringing in Texas.
Thematic overlaps are therefore a key thread of the record, Lou Turner explores relationships like those “between the spiritually transcendent and secular mundane, the solitary practice of songwriting and the communal experience of music making, traditional melodic song forms and experimental improvisation.” The concept extends to the style too, the vocals sitting at the intersection of warmth and wryness—a subtly mischievous, knowing edge that does not undercut the tenderness but supports it, lending a real human air.
The album was released by SPINSTER, the new intersectional feminist record label from folklorist Emily Hilliard and Sally Anne Morgan (The Black Twig Pickers, House and Land), who are dedicated to “supporting a diverse range of musicians who explore territory across the traditional, radical, and experimental.” Lou Turner certainly traverses such ground. Rooted in classic folk and rock yet never bound by their conventions, Turner draws from jazz and avant garde sensibilities, the work of fellow rule breakers like Ruth Garbus and Bill Callahan, as well as her own idiosyncrasies to create something familiar but wholly new, indebted to several genres yet owned by none.
Today we have the pleasure of sharing a video for ‘Flickering Protagonist’, a track that in many ways serves as the crux of the album. Again based around convergence and contradiction, the song combines the sacred and the secular, exploring how concepts might coexist and colour one’s life in ways that far exceed simple competition. “It’s personal in the way it reclaims biblical references that I grew up with,” Turner describes, “I wanted to create my own narrative by juxtaposing and grounding those references with everyday present realities, like grocery shopping or replacing your car battery.”
The video was directed, shot, and edited by Joe Kenkel with assistance from Trevor Nikrant, and takes place among the stacks of the library in which Turner works in non-quarantine times. You can watch it below:
Songs For John Venn is out now via SPINSTER and available via Bandcamp both digitally and on cassette.
Photos by Linda Parrott / Album art by Dan Melchior / Album title art by Sally Anne Morgan