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 August 30. As part of the announcement, she has shared her double single “Octagonal Room” / “Cumulous Potion (For The Clouds To Sing),” which comes off the forthcoming release. 

Zdenka 2080 was heavily influenced 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.”

The album 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 hails from Crockett in Northern California. 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 says. 

Zdenka 2080 is released via Brainfeeder on August 30, with “Cumulous Potion (For the Clouds to Sing)” and “Octagonal Room” streaming below. 

Tracklisting

01. Suddenly

02. Octagonal Room

03. She Wakes Up / First Dimension

04. Love the Sun

05. Cirrus Floccus / Second Dimension

06. Cumulous Potion (For the Clouds to Sing)

07. Nostalgic Montage

08. Meet Zee in 3-D / Third Dimension

09. Confessions of the Metropolis Spaceship

10. A Brief Intermission

11. Sitting with Thoughts

12. Earth Creature

13. Peculiar Machine / Fourth Dimension

14. Drifting

15. You Get Blue

16. Diatoms and Dinoflagellates / Fifth Dimension

17. Transformation of a Molecule / Sixth Dimension

18. The Artist / Seventh Dimension

19. Collision, Gravity, Time

20. Heads Turn to Paintings

21. Cosmic Dawn / Eighth Dimension

22. To Be Continued..