Salami Rose Joe Louis for Tibi Close Friends
Live from Los Angeles, California.
A little over two years ago, I sat in Austin, TX trying to envision a concept that would cohesively blend Tibi, music, video, film photography, and small independent artists into one. That vision became Tibi Close Friends. Nine projects later, we’ve had the privilege of collaborating with artists like Bebe Stockwell, Brunello, and Evan Blix - and every artist who has stepped in front of our cameras has shaped this series into what it is today. Each of those productions lives on Tibi.com, and each one is worth watching - they are the foundation this project stands on.
Today, we launch our next chapter. And this one is different.
Salami Rose Joe Louis is signed to Flying Lotus’s Brainfeeder label. She has a co-write and feature on Toro y Moi’s Mahal, a writing credit on Baby Keem’s Grammy-winning debut, and has toured supporting Clairo, Flying Lotus, Toro y Moi, and Tune-Yards. I share the resume not to name-drop, but because it makes everything that follows - how this project came to be, and how quickly it became real - all the more remarkable.
For those new here: Tibi Close Friends is a project where we partner with independent artists to produce intimate live performances, mini documentaries, and creative collaborations. No press cycle, no product placement, no brief. Just an artist, in their element, documented honestly. And for SRJL, we produced one of our most ambitious episodes yet: a two-part live set and a sit-down interview, filmed in Los Angeles this past spring. The two halves are deliberate - the performance shows the artist, the craft, and the expression of self through her chosen medium, while the interview shows the human behind the artist, in a light that perhaps few have taken the time to see.
It should be pretty apparent at this point that one of my favorite ways to spend time is by digging for music, particularly by small and independent artists. That’s how I stumbled onto SRJL and the more I dug, the more I realized I wasn’t listening to a catalog of songs, but rather an entire person pressed into sound - the science, the humor, the heartbreak, all of it audible. She studied earth and planetary science at UC Santa Cruz - ocean chemistry, specifically - and worked in research labs as music, in her words, kept chomping at the soul until she gave in. She records almost everything on a single machine, a Roland MV-8800 she’s nicknamed “Funfunfun,” because she works better inside constraints than in the infinite scroll of a computer screen. The machine has no plugins and only eight audio inputs, which means every sound must be dialed on the way in rather than fixed in post - and she loves it for exactly that reason. There's a lesson in there that extends well beyond music production: infinite options don't make the work better - they just let you put off deciding what it is. Strip away everything you could hide behind, and what's left has to be true.
The duality of being both a student of science and a student of art is a unique and highly intriguing realm to exist within. And when we sat down in LA, she described her years in the lab and her years in music as complementary disciplines - both require sitting with a problem, coming at it from an endless array of angles, patience, and being comfortable in solitude and the abstract. I’ve thought about that framing constantly since and I think it represents Creative Pragmatism in its purest form: rigor and imagination not at odds, but feeding each other.
And beyond the work - she is one of the most gracious humans we’ve ever collaborated with. Kind, present, generous with her time and her story. Every step of this project confirmed our initial instinct.
When we realized we needed to work with SRJL, I couldn’t find a contact anywhere. No management email I could surface, no booking link, nothing but the Instagram DMs. Then I found her Bandcamp page, clicked the little email link, and sent a brief note, something along the lines of: genuine fan of your work, would love to chat about a creative project I’ve been working on for our brand Tibi - I think there’s something great we can create together. You never expect an artist of SRJL’s caliber to answer a message sent through the basic contact form on a Bandcamp page, so I hit send with zero expectation of a response.
She responded within a couple of hours. We were on the phone that same day. The rest is history.
And history, in this case, moved quickly. In one of those happy accidents I’ve come to expect from this work - the ones that happen because we love what we do and never really shut off - SRJL happened to be on tour at that very moment, with a stop at Irving Plaza in New York the following week. Matt and I cleared our evenings and went to see, in person, the artist we hoped would soon become our next Tibi Close Friend. A historic room, 1,000 people, and not a single phone in the air. Everyone present, enthralled, and captured by her instrumentals, her divine voice, and her world. We looked at each other and knew.
I’ve written before about the importance of communication in bringing these projects to life as it is, above all else, the reason these projects succeed. From that first same-day phone call through months of planning across two coasts and a touring schedule, every text and every email was met in real time, fixing things on the spot, collaborating rather than coordinating. When you speak the same language, literally and figuratively, a flow state arises, and the work carries itself.
Months of conversation later, we flew to Los Angeles, rented a car, brought three iPhones, a digicam, a DSLR, and two microphones. No fancy lighting rigs, no set builds, no production trucks. Raw, real, and legit - the way this series has always been made, and the way it will stay, no matter how big the artists get. Somewhere in the edit, it occurred to me that we shoot the way SRJL records: nothing to hide behind, everything dialed on the way in. Matt engineered the video and audio capture across every format we’d need, while I directed, shot stills, and ran the interview. Two people, one artist, and a shared understanding of what we were making.
For the live set and interview, SRJL wore two looks:
The two-part live performance and interview went places most artist interviews rarely do. She took us back to her first instrument - a blender, played in a high school punk band, into which audience members would toss things to be blended live (dry pasta most memorably). She walked us through the car accident in 2017 that gave her the clarity, and the permission, to finally choose music, and told us about the friend who believed in her work when almost everyone else called it too weird - the reason, she says, she makes music at all. She spoke about unlearning the do-everything-yourself mentality she carried for years, pulled out the watercolors she’s become obsessed with, and described the stripped-down guitar-and-voice album she’s been circling for years but hasn’t yet made.
Similarly to our past collaborations, I have been listening to the live set on repeat the entire time I have been writing this Substack. When the creative process revolves around “Do we like this? Is this cool to us? Does this make us excited?”, it fuels you rather than drains you. To fly across the country with a camera bag and a friend, and come home with something like this, is not lost on us in the slightest.
At the very end of our interview, we asked if there was anything she wanted to leave the world with. She paused, and then said: “Thank you for letting me make music.”
When an artist like SRJL responds to an open-ended final question with pure gratitude, it tells you everything the previous forty-five minutes confirmed. So let us return it in kind. Thank you to Salami Rose Joe Louis - the artist, the scientist, and now, a true Tibi Close Friend - for trusting two people with a camera bag to tell her story, and for reminding us why we make these in the first place. And thank you, as always, to everyone reading, watching, and listening.
Our tenth Tibi Close Friends project is now live. The full performance and interview can be viewed on Tibi.com and YouTube. You can also find Salami Rose Joe Louis on Instagram, the digital streaming platforms, and of course Bandcamp - where this whole thing started with one small email.