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Discography

Gabriel Olafs

Performance (Live on KEXP)

Gabríel Ólafs was only 14 when he wrote the song that landed him his first record deal, which saw his first album, Absent Minded, released on an independent label five years’ later. His tracks have since been streamed tens of millions of times online; his music is, wrote Pop Matters, ‘brimming with beauty’. Now 23, the Icelandic composer has come of age, with a signing to Decca Records US. His major label debut, Solon Islandus, is an ambitious concept album that pays homage to Iceland’s artistic heritage, drawing inspiration from one of its great poets, Davíð Stefánsson, in pieces for solo piano, piano with strings, choir and electronics. And yet while the album honours the past, it also looks to the future. Ólafs has worked with some of the most exciting creative talents in his country today, bringing together contemporary dance, film, photography, and fashion to create a truly transmedia experience.
 
In every respect, Solon Islandus is a deeply personal album. Ólafs was read Stefánsson’s poems as a child by both his father and grandfather. ‘Stefánsson is beloved in my family,’ he explains. ‘He was the first twentieth-century poet in Iceland to write with true emotion, straight to the heart.’ Ólafs especially fell in love with the earliest poetry collection, Black Feathers (Svartar Fjaðrir). ‘When I was making this album, it was one hundred years since its publication,’ he notes, adding, ‘Stefánsson was my age as well.’ Ólafs would read the poems and try to capture their essence in melody. The texts are rich with imagery, from ravens to lilies, restless birds to ashes, but at the heart of this album are human stories. The title Solon Islandus comes from Stefánsson’s only novel, the ‘beautiful, tragic and dramatic’ tale of a real-life Icelandic drifter, Sölvi Helgason. ‘Tracks like Drifter and Júlíana are inspired by characters from the novel,’ says Ólafs. ‘It’s almost as if this was a movie, and these are their themes.’ 
 
The Latin-sounding words ‘Solon Islandus’ evoke a solitary Icelander – not only Helgason but also Stefánsson, who ended up being alone and working as a librarian. ‘I think this is the most Icelandic album I’ll ever make,’ says Ólafs. ‘Solon Islandus represents the little island. He feels larger than life but he’s really small. He’s doing his best – and that’s very much Iceland.’ And the first choral piece that Ólafs has written, arranged and conducted shares the album’s title. ‘I was listening to a lot of Icelandic choral works, which are sort of folk songs from Iceland that have been arranged brilliantly for choir,’ he explains. ‘Iceland has a long tradition of choral music and I was also working with even older, pagan, Viking music that I was studying.’ 
 
Ólafs greatly values Iceland’s long cultural history. ‘For me, right now, music is the most powerful artistic form coming out of Iceland, but through the years, it has been literature,’ he says, noting that this legacy stretches right back to the Vikings. To add to the authentic feel of Solon Islandus, several poems from Black Feathers appear on the album, read by two legendary Icelandic actors. ‘The language influences the way you write,’ says Ólafs. ‘Icelandic can be very harsh, like nature, but there’s lots of adjectives. We have lots of words for weather, travelling, the sea and snow.’ The first ever English translations of Stefánsson’s poetry, by David McDuff, were commissioned for this project and will appear in the liner notes in the CD and vinyl products.
 
Yet if all this conjures the familiar image of a land of fire and ice, geysers and glaciers, that would be misleading. Solon Islandus is a Reykjavik album, born and bred. Ólafs works in a studio in the famous Harpa concert hall, also the base of the Reykjavik Recording Orchestra, which he co-founded and is Iceland’s first dedicated orchestra for film, TV, games and music. Harpa is a dramatic glass construction at the heart of the country’s capital, perched right on the harbour. ‘If I look out the window now, I can see the sea, so nature is there,’ explains Ólafs. ‘But I’m not from the countryside, and I’m not writing this in a hut or walking in the snow. My inspiration is the history of the Icelandic nation and people, our culture and literature.’ 
 
And Ólafs’ links to Reykjavik run deep. His great-grandparents were from the street in which Ólafs himself now lives. His great-grandfather was a navigator, guiding ships safely into harbour; his office was exactly where Ólafs’ studio sits now. ‘I look at the same view he looked at,’ reflects Ólafs. He wrote the whole album at Harpa; the accompanying video was filmed there too. ‘It’s a very human recording, but I wanted the visuals to be futuristic,’ he explains. ‘Early on I worked with a visual artist and the Icelandic Dance Company. In the video, there are eight dancers, reflecting the eight singers in the choral title track Solon Islandus. Eight people come together to form a simple unity: Solon Islandus becomes less of a person and more of a unity.’
 
Ólafs has a longstanding love of film, and his passion for it shaped his creative process. ‘My approach wasn’t to say this is a record for piano and string quartet, so you know what to expect,’ says Ólafs. ‘I made motifs and melodies, like you might for a film score, and then played around with tonal palette.’ Cello, harp, electronics, and choir all feature in his aural colour palette. Ólafs played with musical texture too, weaving in the static sounds of an old radio given to him by his uncle, and an old mono recording of an orchestra. ‘I wanted a blend of Icelandic choral inspiration and old film scores,’ he says. ‘At the time I was writing Solon Islandus, I was listening to Max Steiner and Ennio Morricone.’
 
It's far from the first time film and music have intertwined for Ólafs. His musical life began when he was five years old and his grandfather, an accordion player, introduced him to the piano. He started to study classical piano, but soon became bored – until, that is, he discovered he could play by ear. ‘That’s all I did as a kid by myself. I would play melodies that I heard on the radio or in movies,’ he recalls. ‘I could play the Lord of the Rings theme on the piano and being able to play what I wanted is what kept me at the instrument.’ Time at the piano paved the way to composing. ‘If you can play by ear, you can make a melody. It’s the same part of the brain, I think,’ says Ólafs. After his first song was played in public as a teenager, he knew he was hooked on writing music: ‘That’s when I kept going and didn’t stop.’ After stints working in studios producing pop music and playing the piano at weddings and funerals, he was able to become a full-time composer. ‘It’s an immense joy,’ he says. ‘It’s what I love.’
 
‘I’m definitely influenced by the Icelandic sound, which is very quiet and delicate, verging on minimalist,’ says Ólafs, ‘but what I do differently is that I really like melodies. Tchaikovsky, Morricone, John Williams – they can all write a good melody. Nothing really compares.’ Working at his piano, Ólafs always begins with melodies, recording the results with voice memos on his phone – ‘I have maybe 200 of them’. For Solon Islandus, he tried to simplify his melodies as much as possible. ‘I wanted to match the poems, which are straight to the point, straight to the heart,’ he explains. And when he’s writing a melody, Ólafs is often in search of a feeling. Some might call it familiarity, others nostalgia. Ólafs chooses another word: ‘To me, it’s just like home. That’s what I want my music to feel like.’