How Video Games Inspired Icelandic Composer Gabríel Ólafs – My Perfect Console #164

What can video games teach a classical composer about atmosphere, wonder, and emotional space? In this episode of My Perfect Console, host Simon Parkin joined by Icelandic pianist, composer, and producer Gabríel Ólafs, one of the most distinctive young voices in contemporary instrumental music. Born in Reykjavík in 1998, Gabríel began playing piano at the age of five, training in both classical and jazz traditions before emerging as a recording artist while still in his teens. Since then, his music has steadily expanded in scope — from the intimacy of Absent Minded and Piano Works to the folk-inflected textures of Lullabies for Piano and Cello, inspired by a 1906 Icelandic songbook he discovered in an antique shop. Most recently, with Polar, he has moved further into speculative, atmospheric composition, drawing in part on the emotional language of video games: their sense of exploration, loneliness, beauty, and suspended time. In this conversation, we discuss: how video games shaped his imagination as a composer the difference between writing music for performance and music that creates a world the pull of atmosphere, fantasy, and emotional ambiguity in both games and contemporary classical music growing up in Iceland, and how landscape and isolation can find their way into sound the unusual overlap between gaming sensibility and modern composition and the five games that make up Gabríel’s perfect console This is a conversation about music, mood, memory, and the power games have to shape artistic taste long after the console is switched off. 🎮 Expect a thoughtful discussion of composition, fantasy, and feeling — and a fascinating look at how one of the most exciting young composers in the world has translates the dreamlike language of games into music.