Lindsay Olsen channels her work as a Bay Area multi-instrumentalist, producer, and singer/songwriter through the warped conceptual project Salami Rose Joe Louis. After two earlier albums issued more independently, she joined Flying Lotus’s Brainfeeder label for Zdenka 2080 in 2019, an album of concise experimental pop fragments, abstract rhythms, and bedroom R&B pieces threaded together by a dystopian sci-fi storyline. Four years later, the follow-up Akousmatikous picked up that narrative thread, drawing additional inspiration from Olsen’s background as a climate scientist.
Olsen grew up in San Diego and performed with punk bands as a teenager. After college she settled in Crockett, California, just north of the Bay Area, and took a post as a scientist while simultaneously immersing herself in composition. She began releasing music under the name Salami Rose Joe Louis, derived from two childhood nicknames, and focused on compact, sketch-like songs saturated with synthesizers and cosmic imagery. Her debut Son of a Sauce! appeared in 2016, followed in 2017 by Zlaty Sauce Nephew; both were expansive collections of brief, unsteady pop experiments and drifting beats.
Soon after Zlaty Sauce Nephew’s release, Olsen was injured in a car accident that kept her out of work for several weeks. During that interval one of her tracks appeared in a commercial, and the combination of circumstances led her to pursue music full-time. While preparing her next album she toured with Toro y Moi and signed with Brainfeeder, an imprint that matched Salami Rose Joe Louis’s singular extraterrestrial pop aesthetic; the label issued her third album, Zdenka 2080, in August 2019. Whereas the earlier records were created largely alone or with bass and drums from Oaklander Cheflee, her fourth album adopted a more collaborative method. Akousmatikous arrived in May 2023 and expanded Olsen’s conceptual vision with additional instrumentation and co-writing from Betamax and Danalogue of the Comet Is Coming (under their Soccer96 alias), Brijean Murphy and Doug Stuart of Brijean, and Juuwah.
