Matt Uelmen Sewer Lyrics

"Sewer" - Liner Notes - August 16, 2000

This piece, which needed to be reworked from a 50 second quickie into its current state when the size of the area grew exponentially over the course of 1999, provided the first chance to put the chinoiserie of Act II in an action setting.

The Clarion music store in San Francisco was a great resource for all kinds of exotic musical loot during the making of Diablo II, and provided me with my first glimpse of an erhu (a kind of one-stringed chinese violin) in action. This instrument, briefly darting through the Thai gong and rain sticks which predominate in Act II, was a good example of the unusual elements I tried to use throughout the middle acts of our little game. Writing the music for this act was a constant battle between seeing what strange sounds I could get away with versus maintaining the atmosphere needed to create the proper monster-skewering ambience.

This track was a bit easier than most, though, simply because the drips and echoes of the sewer enviroment suggested a relatively clear musical direction. I tried to take a few pages out of the classical playbook in the pacing used around 3 minutes into the piece, and enjoyed tweaking the tempo faster and slower to create a more definite climax and resolution than the piece might have had otherwise.

- Matt Uelmen