Hob Soundtrack

Hob Soundtrack, Matt Uelmen, 2017

With its two Torchlight titles — particularly the excellent Torchlight II — developer Runic Games had established strong credentials in the action RPG space, even managing to hold its ground against mighty rivals such as Diablo III. Its next title was Hob, which shifted focus towards an open-world adventure clearly indebted to The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. Hob’s world is a giant machine made up of myriads of levers, dials, and pulleys that the title character must use to repair and cleanse the land after it has been corrupted by a mysterious force. The concept of the game’s realm as a titanic mechanical contraption is an appealing one, and the perfect set-up for visual wonders and intriguing puzzles, although reviewers also noted more frustrating aspects, combat among them.

Critics also highlighted the game’s aesthetic strengths — its gorgeous visuals and its soundtrack by veteran Matt Uelmen. Having scored Runic Games’ Torchlight titles, Uelmen had marked a resounding return to form with Torchlight II. That soundtrack felt like the apex of his meticulously composed trademark style, mixing electronics, orchestral writing, and rock elements in a way that set his fantasy scores apart from the often homogeneous competition. Hob, however, gave Uelmen an opportunity to broaden his palette again, as he was actively looking to avoid genre clichés — both those heard in other fantasy scores and those of his own making.

Recording over two years, between June 2015 and July 2017, Uelmen made the most of the time he was given to create the Hob soundtrack. The basis of his approach was unusual: to merge three different instruments with common properties into one — Moog guitar, fretless bass, and pedal steel. Arguably, few would associate any of these instruments with fantasy scoring, but they allowed Uelmen to work with micro-intervals, offering a route away from classical notation and thus from more traditional sounds. Training himself on all three instruments and combining them, Uelmen aimed to create “a futuristic and rubbery, yet still pretty lead instrument.”

The final product does indeed push Uelmen’s music into new territory. In fact, the Hob soundtrack may well be unique among video game scores. There are connections to other works, most obviously within Uelmen’s own discography, but ultimately Hob innovates beyond fantasy game scoring alone. What is most striking about Uelmen’s creation is the near-complete absence of traditional harmonies, melodies, or rhythms. There is some, usually light, percussion on Hob, but it rarely drives the pieces forward. And while melodic progressions emerge here and there, they never dominate a track, nor are they designed to linger easily in the memory. The closest stylistic antecedent for Uelmen’s experimentation here may be post-rock — the opening of “Forest” sounds as if it could have drifted in from an Animal Collective album from the Feels era.

Uelmen’s compositions are best described as extended sound collages, continuously changing shape as they blend and manipulate electronic and acoustic instruments with jaw-dropping ease, to the point where those instruments are often no longer clearly distinguishable from one another. His merging of three instruments into one does indeed create an exotic, otherworldly quality. Yet one would still be hard-pressed to identify that newly created lead instrument at every turn amid the score’s thick washes of sound. One possible descriptor for this kind of floating, meandering music would be “ambient”, but the term often implies a certain sparseness of timbre and activity. The Hob soundtrack is the opposite. It moves at a languid pace yet remains lushly arranged, presenting combinations of timbres previously unheard, at least within game music, and never ceasing to fascinate over its hypnotic 65-minute running time.

Uelmen’s work had always possessed a strong textural bent, and his fastidious attention to the details of recording and production had shaped his music from Diablo onwards. But Hob takes those interests to a new extreme, moving decisively away from the increased melodicism of Torchlight II. That score, too, suggested environments rather than presenting definitive musical statements. Still, it created distinct underscoring for specific locations. By contrast, the Hob soundtrack feels like a single living, breathing organism, perhaps in balance with the game world’s mechanical nature, slowly morphing from one previously unseen sight into another.

If Hob’s music evokes a particular location, it is perhaps a hazy jungle where every object around the listener is reduced to elusive shades that intrigue even as they remain intangible, dissipating back into the dusky, heavy air from which they emerged. Uelmen’s album production deepens this effect, draping every instrument in a thick, reverberant sound that purposefully swallows detail; even the distortions on the whale call-synths in “Anima” feel deliberate. The production also has a tangible warmth that renders these sound collages spacious and welcoming, yet faintly claustrophobic, as though surrounded by encroaching walls of sound. Uelmen’s use of micro-intervals and his avoidance of conventional major- and minor-key harmonies complete this strategy of keeping the music enticingly indefinable.

It is, to say the least, an unusual way to score a fantasy game — but it makes perfect sense once one considers the brief Uelmen was given. Hob co-director Marsh Lefler had asked the composer to underscore the protagonist’s solitude and his loss of reference points. Uelmen’s harmonically ambiguous music, together with its lack of clear melodies and rhythms, achieves precisely that. There is no one for Hob’s lead character to meet on his journey, no character or location clearly encapsulated in music of readily identifiable character. All he experiences is a sometimes disorienting passage through strange, amorphous, seemingly endless lands. At the same time, Uelmen ensures that the music retains an undercurrent of mysticism, subtly giving Hob the sense of scale required for a world-saving adventure even as it breaks with fantasy-scoring traditions.

Given all this, the Hob soundtrack is the kind of work that eludes easy verbal description. It creates its own universe, one in which instruments, moods, and compositions bleed into one another so completely that discussing them as separate entities can feel beside the point. That is not to suggest that Hob is a monochrome work that could continue indefinitely; such a view would ignore just how much happens in each cue, and how much creativity and care have gone into its innumerable details. It’s simply that the Hob soundtrack is not especially concerned with constructing a strongly delineated album arc. Instead, it devotes itself to creating a fascinating here and now.

That said, penultimate track “Anima” does seem to build on the foundations laid by the earlier pieces, crystallising the spiritualism that runs through the Hob soundtrack through echoing flute calls ringing down from on high into foggy mountain valleys. From there, “Anima” moves towards a fascinating, unearthly climax as fuzzy synth pads evoke dizzying heights beneath a white, blinding sun and its chilling yet fiery rays. Like a modernist painting, “Anima” — and Hob as a whole — seems less concerned with capturing the shape of things than with distilling their essence. This challenging, enigmatic work further solidifies Uelmen’s reputation as one of game music’s most innovative creators of worlds.