TRADITIONAL MUSIC OF AMYGDALA

The Artist LÁSZLÓ HORTOBÁGYI is interested in expeditions. Music is his medium for travelling through time. He was born in 1950 in Budapest, a city which has remained his home base. He took his first trips in 1967 to North India to record music, to pursue philosophical studies and to learn rudra-vina, sitar, surbahar and tabla.

In 1981 he founded the Gáyan Uttejak Society, an imaginary musical organization which functioned at the same time as a studio and archive. A society in this name had been truly founded in India in 1884 but had already dissolved by 1917. The fictitious recording of the "6th All-India Music Conference" is dedicated to Visnu Narayan Bhatkande, the founder of the above mentioned society.

The technological developments in the music industry gave L.H. the tools to compose, in the time span of half a year, what would have taken an Indian musician 20 years of practice to realize. But now, when the technical possibilities exist to combine the occidental with the oriental musical forms or the European polyphony with the middle age rhythmic structures, the worldwide production of music is comparable to that of washing powder. An overkill in banality.

For this reason L. H. produces virtual musical worlds and fictitious cultures. Always with his vision directed towards the east, he takes samples from obscure ethnological recording segments and mixes them into his rich compositional structures.

He belongs to the class of those few Europeans who still understand the rules of the long forgotten oriental art of sound. Through his works L.H. endeavors to conserve this art, before the steamroller of the stupefied media-age makes it totally flat.

(©1996 Erdenklang Musikverlag. Most written material taken from Peter Pannke and "The Transglobal & Magic Sounds of László Hortobágyi, a sampler on the Network Label)

"Traditional Musik of Amygdala" offers you an imaginary journey throughout the entire Amygdala Empire in the spirit of the ethno-musicology expeditions at the turn of the century. "Traditional Music of Amygdala“ is a musicological-sociological fiction with a great past in human culture concerning ceremony of alienation and death, wrapped in rituals and mysteries.

Amygdala (corpus amygdaloideum) is to be found in our brain; hidden there are human "behaviour“, genetically inherited and the instinctsystem formed by culture and environment. The world is being totally reorganized by the modern industrial societies with their overhelming superiority in technology and dynamic expansion, and all the traditional cultures which are alien to their technologically "homogeneous“ societies are doomed to extinction.

Therefore a real possibility exists that the traditional cultures will out before they can get into "world-culture“ circulation. With this mystical, futuristic pictures László Hortobágyi by no means describes an apocalyptic mood. He sensitizes our cultural (listening) consciousness by transporting, in his stories and music, Asian culture images into socio-political surroundings of the future.