Matt Uelmen is a dark ambient musician based in Los Angeles, California. He is best known for his work on various computer games for Blizzard Entertainment from 1996 to 2007. Matt was born in July 31, 1973 in the South Bay area of greater Los Angeles. Almost all of his formal training in music came through piano lessons from Lenée Bilski from the ages of 6 to 13, which were discontinued when his family moved to San Jose, California during his high school years. Matt is largely self-taught as a...
Matt Uelmen is a dark ambient musician based in Los Angeles, California. He is best known for his work on various computer games for Blizzard Entertainment from 1996 to 2007.
Matt was born in July 31, 1973 in the South Bay area of greater Los Angeles. Almost all of his formal training in music came through piano lessons from Lenée Bilski from the ages of 6 to 13, which were discontinued when his family moved to San Jose, California during his high school years. Matt is largely self-taught as a multi-instrumentalist and orchestrator, with a familiarity with instruments in the keyboard, guitar, flute and percussion families. Most of his performance experience is on the keyboard, though the piece most associated with him, "Tristram" or "Towne" from the Diablo series of computer games, features his playing on 12-string guitar and flute.
This series of games was the core creation of his employer, Condor Inc (later renamed Blizzard North), where he worked for 11 years. This series is estimated to have collectively sold over twenty million copies and, more remarkably, was still on the shelves at major retailers over a decade after the release of the original "Diablo" and seven years after the release of the final installation in the series, "Diablo II: Lord of Destruction". This expansion also featured Matt's first foray into full orchestral writing, with a performance by the Slovak Radio Symphony Orchestra. Material from a second recording with this group was used in Matt's later work for Blizzard Entertainment on the "World of Warcraft" series, which incorporated over three hours of his music as of the release of "World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade".
In 2009, Matt moved on to Runic games and produced the soundtracks for Torchlight and Torchlight 2. These games were created by ex-employees of the Blizzard North division. The next soundtrack Matt produced at Runic Games was "Hob". Hob was not a commercial success despite positive reviews and Runic games was shutdown shortly after by parent company Perfect world in late 2017. A new game company called Echtra games was created and immediately started to work on the successor to Torchlight 2, called "Torchlight Frontiers". Matt was brought on to write the soundtrack Torchlight Frontiers, which is scheduled to be released in 2019. Read more on Last.fm. User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License; additional terms may apply.
