Lament for Hypatia (microtonal fretless guitar music)

While the story of Hypatia and the Great Library of Alexandria has been subject to many historical distortions, here is the version of the mythos that best serves our artistic purpose: At its height, the Great Library held some 100,000 books (about 1.2 x 10^12 bits of information for you fellow nerds or 400,000 scrolls for archaic format obsessed hipsters), the sum total of the knowledge of the classical world. After a long period of neglect, we find Hypatia, the last guardian of the knowledge contained in that now decaying institution. In a period of unrest during the late 4th and early 5th centuries C.E., the last remnants of the Great Library were destroyed by a mob of religious zealots, and Hypatia was made a martyr in a horrific fashion. One is invited to draw contemporary parallels to this legend as they see fit.

Compositionally, I was aiming to combine minimalistic and dark ambient elements with a bit of sludgy heavy metal in the vein of Sunn O))) and Boris. This is of course, married to all of the usual xenharmonic trappings of my work. The piece was written in 13-limit just intonation. All sounds originated from a fretless seven-string tuned down to drop-djent (its lowest note is only a semitone removed from a bass guitar's).