The Amygdala Expedition

The Amygdala Expedition was composed in 1989 to be originally released on vinyl, so for the first time it is available from the original master on the format which it was conceived for. László Hortobágyi is interested in expeditions. Music is his medium for travelling through time. 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
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 was born in 1950 in Budapest. He took his first trips in 1967 to North India to record classical music, to pursue music-philology studies and to learn rudra-vina, sitar, surbahar and tabla. In 1981 he founded the Gayan Uttejak Orchestra and Gayan Uttejak Society, an musical organization which functioned at the same time as a studio and archive. The progenitor Society in this name of Gayan Uttejak Mandali had been truly founded in India in 1884 but had already dissolved by 1917