In a crowded field of post-minimalist pianist/composers—think Max Richter, Ludovico Einaudi and Kelly Moran—Iceland's Gabríel Ólafs has carved out a charming niche for himself with his humble and instinctive piano-driven pieces. A pianist by the age of five and a trained composer by his early teens, he creates serene and undulating miniatures that often evoke images from his childhood years spent outside Reykjavík, sometimes culling from the natural world—as in ”Cyclist Waltz”, “Another Fall, Another Spring” and “Think of Home”—or his own family history. Ólafs was discovered by Björk’s manager at 19 and catapulted to renown within his home country on the basis of his piece “Absent Minded" (also the title of his acclaimed 2019 debut album), with its neoclassical melodies and snippets of rustling field recordings. Followed by 2020’s Piano Works and 2022’s Solon Islandus, Absent Minded was the first of a run of LPs across which Ólafs has clarified and built out his corpus of—as he often characterises them—scores to imaginary films.