Salami Rose Joe Louis — Zdenka 2080 (Aug. 30, 2019) 
• Cosmic producer/songwriter signed to the Brainfeeder label excelling at albums of brief weirdo~pop miniatures.
Location: Crockett in Northern California
Styles: Alternative Rock, Experimental Electronic, Indie Pop, Indie Electronic
Album release: August 30, 2019
Record Label: Brianfeeder
Duration: 43:54
Tracks:
01. Suddenly 1:46
02. Octagonal Room 2:47
03. She Wakes Up / First Dimension 2:11
04. Love the Sun 2:30
05. Cirrus Floccus / Second Dimension 1:22
06. Cumulous Potion (For the Clouds to Sing) 2:28
07. Nostalgic Montage 2:30
08. Meet Zee in 3~D / Third Dimension 1:56
09. Confessions of the Metropolis Spaceship 2:07
10. A Brief IntermissionUS25X1900545 1:15
11. Sitting with Thoughts 2:11
12. Earth Creature 2:24
13. Peculiar Machine / Fourth Dimension 2:20
14. Drifting 1:53
15. You Get Blue 0:37
16. Diatoms and Dinoflagellates / Fifth Dimension 2:15
17. Transformation of a Molecule / Sixth Dimension 2:21
18. The Artist / Seventh Dimension 2:34
19. Collision, Gravity, Time 1:30
20. Heads Turn to Paintings 1:10
21. Cosmic Dawn / Eighth Dimension 1:38
22. To Be Continued... 1:59
Credits:
• Daoud Anthony Drum Engineering
• Cheflee Bass, Drums, Vocals
• Daddy Kev Mastering
• Salami Rose Joe Louis Bass, Drums, Engineer, Guitar, Mixing, Piano, Synthesizer, Vocals
• Cinque Mubarak Photography
• Avalon Nuovo Inside Photo
• Lindsay Olsen Composer
• Adam Stover Design, Layout
Description:
• Salami Rose Joe Louis announces new album “Zdenka 2080” out 30 August via Brainfeeder and releases double single ‘Octagonal Room’ / ‘Cumulous Potion (For the Clouds to Sing)’. Check the video for ‘Octagonal Room’ directed by Japhy Riddle.
• Salami Rose Joe Louis (real name Lindsay Olsen) — the Bay Area based musician, composer, and producer — will release her new album “Zdenka 2080” via Brainfeeder on 30 August 2019. It follows a busy start to the year in which she joined Toro Y Moi’s “Outer Peace Tour” in the US and supported The Cinematic Orchestra on their European tour.
• Olsen hails from Crockett in Northern California. “It’s a tiny, very strange and sleepy little town. There is a giant sugar factory and the whole town often smells like marshmallows and caramel, which is ideal,” she says. She lives in the basement of her friend’s house which is the perfect place “to get very weird”. In 2017, in the wake of the release of her album “Zlaty Sauce Nephew”, Olsen sustained a wrist injury in a car accident that forced her to miss a fortnight of her regular job at an asbestos lab in Berkeley. Serendipitously, this coincided with one of her tracks unexpectedly being licensed for a TV commercial and Olsen decided to take the plunge. “I felt like it was a sign from the galaxies to take the leap to concentrating on music full time,” she smiles.
• Drawing inspiration from film, literature, art, and music, “Zdenka 2080” was heavily influenced in particular by a series of apocalyptic sci~fi novels by Octavia Butler and Gene Wolf. “They inspired me to explore the realms of fantasy as a means of illuminating concepts and truths about our own society and humanity,” she says. “I also was very inspired by the movies Tekkonkinkreet and Embrace of the Serpent — a beautiful exploration of capitalism, colonialism and greed.”
• Musically, Olsen references fellow members of Oakland record label/musical family Hot Record Societe: Cheflee, Mejiwahn, Asonic Garcia and Pacific Yew as ever present influences, alongside musical giants Shuggie Otis and Herbie Hancock, composer, bandleader and all~round visionary Raymond Scott, plus the likes of Stereolab and Flying Lotus.
• “Sometimes my songs can be very silly and whimsical,” Olsen explains — with new single ‘Cumulous Potion (For the Clouds to Sing)’ being a case in point. “Sometimes they are more serious and emotional. I was looking for a way to weave all of my styles into a cohesive narrative, and I found a lot of inspiration in the way often movies and shows in the animé tradition seamlessly connect the whimsical, silly, serious, and meaningful.”
• Olsen’s music is highly conceptual and “Zdenka 2080” describes a future dystopian Earth in the year 2080 that has been mis~managed by unethical governments and corporations. An initiative by greedy big business to capture solar energy to power a super~sized spaceship, results in a rapidly cooling Earth, and the elite escape via the spaceship to colonize another distant planet. The earthlings left behind find themselves fading with the cooling sun. The first half of the album follows the journey of a young earthling left behind. She discovers an octagonal room with eight paintings, each one leading to a new dimension, and travels through the dimensions in search of a way to save her planet. Her journey eventually leads her to a window where we discover that the octagonal room is the brain of the Earth and the paintings and coinciding dimensions are the thoughts of the Earth creature. The imagery of the paintings affect the thoughts of the Earth creature. Zdenka is the name of the artist who creates the paintings inside the octagonal room. Thus, she can influence the thoughts and actions of the Earth creature and humans on Earth based on what she paints. In this story, Zdenka is lost and confused and she paints very dark imagery. The young earthling begins a quest to find and convince her to paint more positive imagery.
• Olsen says that her moods are often very connected to whether or not she is feeling creatively inspired and productive. “I have noticed creative blocks for me can be dark spirals into ego~centric, self loathing, isolating, and selfish tendencies,” she explains. “In this story, I wanted to explore the ways in which art can easily take dark and careless turns, but how important it is to remember the effects art has on others. I am not advocating for optimistic art only — I just wanted to write this story as a reminder to myself to strive to be intentional in the art I create.”
AllMusic Review by Fred Thomas; Score: ****
• Bay area producer/synth wielder Lindsay Olsen’s work as a planetary scientist may have informed the spacy nature of her solo project Salami Rose Joe Louis, but with Zdenka 2080, the celestial pop of earlier albums unfolds into a larger chronicle of sci~fi themes and whimsical electronic delights. Over the course of 22 wobbly miniatures, the album loosely tells the story of a dystopian future where the earth has been ravaged by the consequences of corporate greed. Olsen originally drafted the somewhat bleak tale on paper before translating it into music, and the final 22 pieces of Zdenka 2080 were whittled down from over 200 song sketches. The storyline of Zdenka 2080 isn’t as implicit as the warm, insular sound world Olsen skillfully crafts over the course of the album.
• Bouncing quickly between styles on brief pieces that rarely get past the two~minute mark, the chapters of the story can take the form of cartoonish kitschy interludes (“Octagonal Room”), lonely bedroom R&B (“Sitting with Thoughts”), or futuristic pop somewhere between Stereolab, Broadcast, and Sun Ra (“Nostalgic Montage,” “Cosmic Dawn/Eighth Dimension”). Zdenka 2080 is the first Salami Rose Joe Louis album for the Brainfeeder label, an imprint curated by electronic innovator and alien thinker Flying Lotus. Olsen is a perfect fit for the label, as her heady pop impulses are often cut short by abstract beats, with pieces like the stumbling instrumental “Drifting” fitting the particular aesthetic of experimental post~hip~hop beatmaking Flying Lotus helped define. The sounds and emotional current of the album change at almost every turn, but the quick shifts gel even when moving from stony, pitch~shifted spoken word diatribes to gorgeous new age synth tones. Olsen pulls all of this off with a light touch. Weird, warped, and somehow playful while presenting songs about earthlings grappling with a dying planet, Zdenka 2080 constructs a universe of its own. It’s a wonderfully strange galaxy to get lost in.
Bandcamp: https://salamirosejoelouismusic.bandcamp.com/album/zdenka-2080
FB: https://www.facebook.com/salamirosejoelouis/
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Location: Crockett in Northern California
Styles: Alternative Rock, Experimental Electronic, Indie Pop, Indie Electronic
Album release: August 30, 2019
Record Label: Brianfeeder
Duration: 43:54
Tracks:
01. Suddenly 1:46
02. Octagonal Room 2:47
03. She Wakes Up / First Dimension 2:11
04. Love the Sun 2:30
05. Cirrus Floccus / Second Dimension 1:22
06. Cumulous Potion (For the Clouds to Sing) 2:28
07. Nostalgic Montage 2:30
08. Meet Zee in 3~D / Third Dimension 1:56
09. Confessions of the Metropolis Spaceship 2:07
10. A Brief IntermissionUS25X1900545 1:15
11. Sitting with Thoughts 2:11
12. Earth Creature 2:24
13. Peculiar Machine / Fourth Dimension 2:20
14. Drifting 1:53
15. You Get Blue 0:37
16. Diatoms and Dinoflagellates / Fifth Dimension 2:15
17. Transformation of a Molecule / Sixth Dimension 2:21
18. The Artist / Seventh Dimension 2:34
19. Collision, Gravity, Time 1:30
20. Heads Turn to Paintings 1:10
21. Cosmic Dawn / Eighth Dimension 1:38
22. To Be Continued... 1:59
Credits:
• Daoud Anthony Drum Engineering
• Cheflee Bass, Drums, Vocals
• Daddy Kev Mastering
• Salami Rose Joe Louis Bass, Drums, Engineer, Guitar, Mixing, Piano, Synthesizer, Vocals
• Cinque Mubarak Photography
• Avalon Nuovo Inside Photo
• Lindsay Olsen Composer
• Adam Stover Design, Layout
Description:
• Salami Rose Joe Louis announces new album “Zdenka 2080” out 30 August via Brainfeeder and releases double single ‘Octagonal Room’ / ‘Cumulous Potion (For the Clouds to Sing)’. Check the video for ‘Octagonal Room’ directed by Japhy Riddle.
• Salami Rose Joe Louis (real name Lindsay Olsen) — the Bay Area based musician, composer, and producer — will release her new album “Zdenka 2080” via Brainfeeder on 30 August 2019. It follows a busy start to the year in which she joined Toro Y Moi’s “Outer Peace Tour” in the US and supported The Cinematic Orchestra on their European tour.
• Olsen hails from Crockett in Northern California. “It’s a tiny, very strange and sleepy little town. There is a giant sugar factory and the whole town often smells like marshmallows and caramel, which is ideal,” she says. She lives in the basement of her friend’s house which is the perfect place “to get very weird”. In 2017, in the wake of the release of her album “Zlaty Sauce Nephew”, Olsen sustained a wrist injury in a car accident that forced her to miss a fortnight of her regular job at an asbestos lab in Berkeley. Serendipitously, this coincided with one of her tracks unexpectedly being licensed for a TV commercial and Olsen decided to take the plunge. “I felt like it was a sign from the galaxies to take the leap to concentrating on music full time,” she smiles.
• Drawing inspiration from film, literature, art, and music, “Zdenka 2080” was heavily influenced in particular by a series of apocalyptic sci~fi novels by Octavia Butler and Gene Wolf. “They inspired me to explore the realms of fantasy as a means of illuminating concepts and truths about our own society and humanity,” she says. “I also was very inspired by the movies Tekkonkinkreet and Embrace of the Serpent — a beautiful exploration of capitalism, colonialism and greed.”
• Musically, Olsen references fellow members of Oakland record label/musical family Hot Record Societe: Cheflee, Mejiwahn, Asonic Garcia and Pacific Yew as ever present influences, alongside musical giants Shuggie Otis and Herbie Hancock, composer, bandleader and all~round visionary Raymond Scott, plus the likes of Stereolab and Flying Lotus.
• “Sometimes my songs can be very silly and whimsical,” Olsen explains — with new single ‘Cumulous Potion (For the Clouds to Sing)’ being a case in point. “Sometimes they are more serious and emotional. I was looking for a way to weave all of my styles into a cohesive narrative, and I found a lot of inspiration in the way often movies and shows in the animé tradition seamlessly connect the whimsical, silly, serious, and meaningful.”
• Olsen’s music is highly conceptual and “Zdenka 2080” describes a future dystopian Earth in the year 2080 that has been mis~managed by unethical governments and corporations. An initiative by greedy big business to capture solar energy to power a super~sized spaceship, results in a rapidly cooling Earth, and the elite escape via the spaceship to colonize another distant planet. The earthlings left behind find themselves fading with the cooling sun. The first half of the album follows the journey of a young earthling left behind. She discovers an octagonal room with eight paintings, each one leading to a new dimension, and travels through the dimensions in search of a way to save her planet. Her journey eventually leads her to a window where we discover that the octagonal room is the brain of the Earth and the paintings and coinciding dimensions are the thoughts of the Earth creature. The imagery of the paintings affect the thoughts of the Earth creature. Zdenka is the name of the artist who creates the paintings inside the octagonal room. Thus, she can influence the thoughts and actions of the Earth creature and humans on Earth based on what she paints. In this story, Zdenka is lost and confused and she paints very dark imagery. The young earthling begins a quest to find and convince her to paint more positive imagery.
• Olsen says that her moods are often very connected to whether or not she is feeling creatively inspired and productive. “I have noticed creative blocks for me can be dark spirals into ego~centric, self loathing, isolating, and selfish tendencies,” she explains. “In this story, I wanted to explore the ways in which art can easily take dark and careless turns, but how important it is to remember the effects art has on others. I am not advocating for optimistic art only — I just wanted to write this story as a reminder to myself to strive to be intentional in the art I create.”
AllMusic Review by Fred Thomas; Score: ****
• Bay area producer/synth wielder Lindsay Olsen’s work as a planetary scientist may have informed the spacy nature of her solo project Salami Rose Joe Louis, but with Zdenka 2080, the celestial pop of earlier albums unfolds into a larger chronicle of sci~fi themes and whimsical electronic delights. Over the course of 22 wobbly miniatures, the album loosely tells the story of a dystopian future where the earth has been ravaged by the consequences of corporate greed. Olsen originally drafted the somewhat bleak tale on paper before translating it into music, and the final 22 pieces of Zdenka 2080 were whittled down from over 200 song sketches. The storyline of Zdenka 2080 isn’t as implicit as the warm, insular sound world Olsen skillfully crafts over the course of the album.
• Bouncing quickly between styles on brief pieces that rarely get past the two~minute mark, the chapters of the story can take the form of cartoonish kitschy interludes (“Octagonal Room”), lonely bedroom R&B (“Sitting with Thoughts”), or futuristic pop somewhere between Stereolab, Broadcast, and Sun Ra (“Nostalgic Montage,” “Cosmic Dawn/Eighth Dimension”). Zdenka 2080 is the first Salami Rose Joe Louis album for the Brainfeeder label, an imprint curated by electronic innovator and alien thinker Flying Lotus. Olsen is a perfect fit for the label, as her heady pop impulses are often cut short by abstract beats, with pieces like the stumbling instrumental “Drifting” fitting the particular aesthetic of experimental post~hip~hop beatmaking Flying Lotus helped define. The sounds and emotional current of the album change at almost every turn, but the quick shifts gel even when moving from stony, pitch~shifted spoken word diatribes to gorgeous new age synth tones. Olsen pulls all of this off with a light touch. Weird, warped, and somehow playful while presenting songs about earthlings grappling with a dying planet, Zdenka 2080 constructs a universe of its own. It’s a wonderfully strange galaxy to get lost in.
Bandcamp: https://salamirosejoelouismusic.bandcamp.com/album/zdenka-2080
FB: https://www.facebook.com/salamirosejoelouis/
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