Salami Rose Joe Louis

Salami Rose Joe Louis is the warped and conceptual recording project of Lindsay Olsen, a Bay Area multi-instrumentalist, producer, and singer/songwriter. After issuing two albums more independently, she signed on with Flying Lotus’ Brainfeeder label for the release of 2019′s Zdenka 2080, a collection of short bursts of experimental pop, abstract beats, and bedroom R&B songs connected by a dystopian sci-fi narrative. The collaborative Akousmatikous, issued four years later, continued the story, with Olsen drawing more from her experience as a climate scientist. Lindsay Olsen was raised in San Diego and played in punk bands growing up. She moved to Crockett, California, a small city north of the Bay Area, after college and began working as a scientist at the same time that she was delving deeper into composition. She started releasing music as Salami Rose Joe Louis, taking the project name from a mash-up of two childhood nicknames for her insular, sketch-like songs heavy on synthesizers and cosmic imagery. She released her first album, Son of a Sauce!, in 2016 and followed the next year with Zlaty Sauce Nephew, both sprawling collections of brief, wobbly pop experiments and drifting beats. Shortly after the release of Zlaty Sauce Nephew, Olsen was involved in a car accident in which she sustained minor injuries that left her unable to work for several weeks. During this time, one of her songs was also used in a commercial, and the confluence of events led her to make a decision to pursue music full-time. While working toward her next album, she toured with Toro y Moi and signed to Brainfeeder. The label proved a perfect home for Salami Rose Joe Louis’ specific brand of extraterrestrial pop, and released her third album, Zdenka 2080, in August 2019. While that LP and her two previous full-lengths were made either on her own or with bass and drums provided by Oaklander Cheflee, Olsen opted for a more collaborative approach in creating her fourth album. Akousmatikous, which arrived in May 2023, brightened Olsen’s conceptual vision with assorted instrumentation and co-writing from the likes of Betamax and Danalogue of the Comet Is Coming (operating under the duo’s Soccer96 guise), Brijean Murphy and Doug Stuart of Brijean, and Juuwah. ~ Fred Thomas & Andy Kellman