Transociety Relics by László Hortobágyi

This release includes a pdf booklet with credits, photos and lots of commentary by László Hortobágyi.


László Hortobágyi is an electron released in the current world sound system galaxy.

His sound art is simultaneously an expanded ethnography of an invented folklore and a way to preserve his acoustic environments for future generations. They are compositions of both terrestrial and spatial sound that present a rich auditory ecology and trace the path from the past to the future. Ancient and futuristic environments interconnected by invisible historical complexities and inhabited by guardians of tradition.

Hortobágyi's music, conceptually fascinating, reveals a unique and transitory world of sound carried out in a singular work form that opens as a portal to another musical dimension.

“Transociety Relics”, his latest opus, compiles previously unreleased archive material spanning the period 1974 / 2019. Each side of this two-LP set reproduces a specific impulse in László Hortobágyi's long and influential career.

SIDE A - “Sygnus Synth Seasons 1974” collects pieces of the 1974-1978 period composed designed and played on the modular synth Sygnus, invented and constructed by Péter Radványi at the Department of Phonetics of the ELTE University.

“My friend Peter Radványi (of the Phoenetics Department of ELTE, Bp.) began the construction of his own modular instrument following the principle of more serious modular synthesizers or the portable EMS Synthi VCS3-AKS 1969-1971 (eg:Whitenoise) at the same time...

"These early electronic music were born in the world of the realized socialism. Not in the West, where thanks to the industrial revolution, by way of original and free accumulation of capital, that is, through exploitation of distant countries and continents, the exotic properties and various genres of musics have become available on the shelves of shopping centers.”

(read more in the downloable “Transociety Relics Supplement 2022”)

SIDE B – “Earthlingua-dub 2010-2016”

“The classic "psydub", however beautified, is nothing more than a modern traditional musical distillate of collective human misery. It is the music of the shattered consciousness that, due to the man-made uninhabitability of the world, wants to leave this reality with the help of music and drugs and seeks another world where it builds a collective culture.The natural evolution of dub is in sync with the misery of the
world’s societies…”

(read more in the downloable “Transociety Relics Supplement 2022”)

SIDE C – “Gandharva Sangeet 2019”

“I would like to outline with personal motivation that the 5 pcs tracks here have come together as the conclusion of my private mythology. A progenitor of this is the Gáyan Uttejak Mandali - Society (at the foot of Malábár Hill, now Mumbái) at the turn of the last century and one of its founders, a certain Visnu Náráyan Bhátkhándé, who wrote a 4-volume summary entitled Gandharva Sangeet Paddhati, (ca. "Heavenly Musicmethod"). - and this was published by krámika pustak máliká, that is, in a series of books. In this series of books…”

(read more in the downloable “Transociety Relics Supplement 2022”)

SIDE D - “Transociety-prána 2013”

“In the year of 2010 a new civilization has emerged, with relics, memorials and the wreckage of Noah’s Ark among its ruins, full of memories of the future and, among others, an incomplete ethnomusicologic collection that would be catalogued in
subsequent eras as “Transociety Relics “ Later, the "subliminal sociostasis" change of consciousness led to the Ars Guothica Nova movement, whose primary aim was to process the Relics Collection. The restored material has entered the common knowledge as an “Entransociety Live” chapter of eL-Horto’s concert repertoire.”

(read more in the downloable “Transociety Relics Supplement 2022”)

Music from a future too far away