Salami Rose Joe Louis

The highly specific and extraordinarily ambiguous name is a playful feint: Salami Rose Joe Louis—the nom de plume of California singer and producer Lindsay Olsen for more than a decade—makes instantly accessible and endearing dream pop, buttressed by trip-hop and trance and anchored by sci-fi escapism and emotional excavation. Olsen grew up in a small town near the Bay Area, surrounded by her dad’s Herbie and Hendrix, Zappa and Marley records; she was a music lover long before she was a musician. In fact, she first showed up on a stage playing a blender in a punk band, and she studied environmental science, eventually researching oceanic acidity. But in 2016, she issued son of a sauce!, a pinballing and intriguing 26-song set made on a Roland MV-8800. “I imagine a lot of weird, cuddly aquatic creatures mixed with sofas, all floating in the air,” she once said, describing her music. She combined science with surrealism, hazy textures and prismatic beats framing some New Age future, warmer and more welcoming.

But Olsen began last year’s Lorings with “Inside,” a rainbow-hued sequence underlining tender vocals about trying times, about how her love and patience were nearing their limits, ripping her open. Many of its short songs, each like a vignette caught inside a dream, set hard times to heavenly music. The stuttering beat and sighing harmonies of “I Will Never Say” counterbalanced frustration and fatigue, while an electronic drone webbed beneath a mumbled hymn during “A Pool to Cry In,” like Grouper doing a laptop set. Still, Olsen maintains a sense of play, from feeding birds rye bread during a dance-party-of-one called “Crow, friendship” to requesting a cuddle during the hypnotic and irresistible “Upstairs.” Salami Rose Joe Louis is the beguiling world Olsen has built for herself, its feelings and fantasies framed by both what she’s already experienced and what she hopes may come next.