VRTIS: MUSIC FOR LIFE

When I come off stage into the audience after playing a set in Vortis, people often ask me:

-What does the name "Vortis" mean and what is the significance of its symbol - an inverted cone with a rod running through its center?

For members of our audience who are interested in the thought behind the music, I offer the following explanation of Vortis. That explanation takes you into the world of art criticism. If you consent to explore that realm with me, you will be able to understand the sense of Vortis's music. I will keep technical terms to a minimum and explain the few I do use, because I believe that the elitism of critical theory needs to be shattered. Only then can the genuine insights of theory be made available to all individuals who want to awaken and enhance their vitality in a corporate culture bent on sucking life out of us and replacing it with "virtual realities" peddled for profit.

"Vortis" is short for VORTICISM - the only avant-garde art movement to emerge in Great Britain in the first wave of rebellious experimentation in the arts in the twentieth century. Vorticism had its brief moment of fame in 1914-1915. Its guiding energies were provided by the poet Ezra Pound and the painter, novelist and essayist Wyndham Lewis.

Those are the basic external facts, what you'd put on a meaningless short-answer test. The internal meaning of Vorticism is found in its artistic project - to make the arts communicators of compressed, directed ENERGY. The movement is named after a physical phenomenon - the vortex; the tornado, the whirlpool, the turbine. In all vortices, the energetic contents of the surrounding world are swept into a spinning spiral and then thrown out of it, back into the environment.

On the analogy of the physical vortex, the Vorticists conceived of artistic activity as mobilizing the energies of natural and cultural life around dynamic individual and group centers of creativity. Each center would constantly change and respond to the world, while retaining independence of its pressure through a growing and strengthening personal core. The products of Vorticist art - music, visual art, literature - are provisional forms of energy, directed by the artist to focus and intensify the vitality of the audience. The first principle of Vorticism - stated in the movement's first manifesto in July, 1914 - is: "The vortex is the point of maximum energy."

Vorticism's basic insight and the foundation of its artistic program is an affirmation of the artist's active role as a creator. As the manifesto puts it:

Yet although perception does move toward the artist, s/he is not a toy of circumstance, a mere switching and combining mechanism of culture and text: "The DESIGN of the future in the grip of the human vortex. All the past that is vital, all of the past that is capable of living into the future, is pregnant in the vortex, NOW."

Here is what you really need to know. We inherit from the nineteenth century the romantic conceit that artists have within themselves the capacity to generate works out of an inner core of authentic personality, and that the works will express this "unique" personality. Those who oppose this sentimental idea tend to replace it with its polar opposite - artists have nothing inside themselves but brains (hardware) that process culture (software) and apply its codes to producing "art."

Vorticism rejects both of those extreme positions. True, there is no such thing as an "authentic self." But there IS a CREATIVE SELF. The materials of the self come from the world and nowhere else, but those materials are organized and directed by a process - THE VORTEX - and that process is cumulative and mutating; become who we are at any moment by transforming the past that is within our response to the world into projects that create the future. That is life itself. Art is a paradigm for life - its exemplary activity. The Vorticist artist creates new organizations of energy from the "living past" to serve the future in the present. These provisional forms - works - are INCITEMENTS TO INTENSITY, COMMUNICATORS OF ATTITUDE, MOBILIZERS AND ENHANCERS OF VITALITY.

And when you think of it, who are you but a sometimes conscious vortex, creating your future - as a SELF - out of the past that is ingrained in you and the pressure of present circumstances? Your self is your own work of Vorticist art.

This is as far as we'll go here into the inner sanctum of the self. All the rest is application. The vorticist fuses art and life, using art to energize life.

The Vorticists of 1914-1915 have a lot of things to say about the kinds of art that should emerge from the creative vortex, but that need not delay us here. Their program for specific applications of their principal ideas were meant to be appropriate to their time and need not confine contemporary vorticists who can use the credo "Art for Life" to take them anywhere they decide to go. The only limit on a vorticist work is that it must take in the energies of the past and the impressions of the present, fusing them, through a medium, into a new provisional form that directs and intensifies them.

Outside Vorticism's limit and rejected by it is art that pretends to be an eternal exemplar of truth or a direct expression of an artist's authentic self; art that allows chance to dominate conscious direction; art that repeats or simply plays with existing forms; and art that invites passive contemplation or spiritual feelings rather than active response. And, especially, art for art's sake. Remember - ART FOR LIFE.

A good way to imagine the vortex is to see the Vorticists' symbol - an inverted cone with a rod running through its center - in your mind's eye: see it as Ezra Pound, who came up with the image, did - as a whirling electrified cone, attracting the world's energy into its spinning core and thrusting out incandescent explosions.

Vortis directs energy through the medium of sound, specifically "rock music." The early Vorticists, of course, knew nothing about rock, but they pledged themselves to create "violent structures of adolescent clearness" from opposing energies. That aim applies to rock better than it does to any other art form.

I use the term "rock" advisedly, because in this day and age it has become a meaningless marketing category, including nearly any imaginable form of music. It is appropriate to call Vortis a rock band, because all of its members come out of various traditions associated with rock'n'roll and rock when those terms had some critical meaning, including, but not exclusively, doo-wop, rockabilly, psychedelia, punk, heavy metal, art rock, rap and different currents of indie rock. All of the members of Vortis appreciate and respond creatively to a wide variety of rock. Their internal musical archives and what they hear NOW are the sources of the energized past out of which they create their songs. Vortis has no preconceived idea of the kind of music it will produce next, only that it will have to be intense and energetic.

Vortis music comes from the emergence of a group vortex made up of the distinctive contributions of each member, from HIS musical vortex. Vortis has no "signature sound" that it seeks to reproduce. Vortis does not straightjacket itself into any conventional genre, striving to apply its codes. Vortis does not imitate any other band. Vortis does not cover songs by other artists, but reserves the discretion to do so in the service of energy.

The typical Vortis song results from successive contributions from the band's members; starting from a riff, lyrics or an appealing concept, the music grows as each musician sees what he can add to the emerging form and, in doing so, change it. As the process of successive addition and alteration matures, the group becomes a unified musical vortex FOR THAT SONG, each member concentrating his energies into the direction that the song has taken.

In its creative activity, Vortis honors the principle that each member be granted as complete as possible discretion over his contribution to a song. The temporary, integrated vortex of each song is the result of the INDEPENDENCE of the individual members - the group vortex is only as strong as the PERSONAL VORTEX of each member. Members, of course, suggest possibilities to their bandmates, but these are offerings, not dictates. Vortis is as anarchic as a small creative group can be. There is no creative leader, no majority voting, no coalitions, no consensus building - just a shared enthusiasm for making songs emerge and generating new ideas. Vortis is organized anarchy, given coherence by a commitment to a common artistic project that can only be successful by honoring and encouraging by the maximum creative independence of each member. The range and richness of the members' musical archives and their receptivity to one another's contributions allows the members of Vortis to produce songs with resonances of rockabilly, rhythm and blues, art rock, punk, rapcore, folk rock and stoner rock, among others. That said, all of the critics who have written about Vortis to date have called it a "punk" band.

"Punk" has become almost as poor a term as "rock" for discriminating musical styles. Yet there is a certain truth to it for labeling Vortis. The Sex Pistols, Wire, the Dead Kennedys and the Anti-Nowhere League are all cited by members, not so much as influences, but as kindred spirits. It would be a mistake, though, to identify Vortis with old-school punk. The ever-growing and mutating living musical pasts of Vortis's members guarantee that the band will never be shut into a particular musical style.

There is a real affinity between Vortis and some aspects of the punk attitude toward music, life and society that developed in the 1970s and 1980s. Vortis treasures the oppositional stance of punk toward established social institutions and the corporate music of the culture industry. Vortis affirms punk's energy. But it would also be a mistake to carry this identification too far. Punk often took a nihilistic stance toward the world, declining into energetic abjection. In contrast, Vortis follows the early Vorticists' positive program of directing energy toward more intense vitality - in a joyful way - rather than expending it in self-immolating rebellion.

Perhaps the best way to understand Vortis musically is to see it as an injection of the Vorticist artistic project into contemporary musical forms, energizing them and carrying them beyond their established boundaries into new sonic dimensions. In this sense, Vortis does not come out of punk exclusively, but connects with it through the intent to create "violent structures of adolescent clearness" among opposing energies. The idea of violent structures combines opposites. Violence, for the early Vorticists, meant explosive energy - their 'zine was entitled BLAST. They saw themselves as firing salvos of energy into the world to shake up its complacency. At the same time, they rejected art that mobilized energy only to dissipate it without purpose. They proposed to compress and intensify energy into forms - structures - directed by concept. To the conventional ear, "violent structures" is an oxymoron, but it turns out to be quite consistent when you listen to any form of loud, energetic music - its very tightness goes over the top, releasing bursts of energy. We tend to think of structure as inducing calm or at least static order, but that is simply a carry over from the debilitating inherited distinction between classical and romantic art, the one restrained, the other free.

In truth, the greatest freedom comes from creating a tight provisional form that forges and precisely structures energy into a blazing spear-point of experience. Following the early Vorticists, Vortis refuses to sacrifice either discipline or energy, and chooses disciplined energy and energetic discipline. Vortis strives for neither spotless technical perfection nor orgiastic dissipation. Violent structures harness energy in specific directions without fully containing it in an inert form. No single work can ever epitomize Vortis - there will always be new provisional violent structures pinpointing and purifying specific experiences.

"Adolescent clearness" means the fresh vision of the truths of the world that is the privilege of fortunate youth in the passage between childhood dependency on caregivers and adult dependency on the occupational system. You do not have to be young in years to grasp tyranny, injustice, hypocrisy and the irrelevance of past formulas to present demands and aspirations with a defiant response, but the child is too vulnerable and the adult is often too jaded or viciously self-justifying to do so. The members of Vortis are no longer teenagers, but they are not jaded and they do not feel a need to justify their positions in society; they make their participation and experience in the occupational structure into fuel for their oppositional stance. Vortis responds to the power structures that cocoon us in technological chains with raucous contempt. You decide if that's punk or a new approach to musical attitude - VORTIS MUSIC.

Within and between Vortis Music are the lyrics and pronouncements delivered by FT, the Fellow Traveler, who joins the fight in song and story against the power structures that dominate the world today. FT is the universal agitator against the SYSTEM, giving encouragement to all dissent, from the right and from the left, but never identifying completely with any faction or ideology, and always ready to go where the action is and whip up a spirit of joyful struggle. FT is on the side of everyone who - for whatever reason - feels that the world can do better than the technology-fueled global capitalist system that rules it today. Indeed, FT is on the side of anyone who has the tiniest spark of rebellion in their heart; he wants to awaken that spirit, kindle it and fan it into a firestorm of raucous contempt - if only for a moment and if only for the pleasure of releasing suppressed emotions and judgments. Not fear, not resentment, not victimhood, but healthy, joyful and vibrant CONTEMPT for all that despoils individual vitality. FT entertains as he agitates and agitates as he entertains: the AGITAINER.

As an AGITAINMENT BAND, Vortis has no ideology of its own beyond opposition to the powers that be, which are taking the life out of us with their appeals to false hopes and fears, their trumped-up wars, their obsession with security, their phoney technological fixes, their fake entertainments and spectacles, and their exploitation of the dispossessed around the world. We have nothing to add to the litany of abuses and programs to rectify them espoused by the myriad individuals and groups opposing globalized capitalism/the New World Order (take your pick). The forces of opposition have deadly fights among themselves, but they have a common enemy. Vortis raises a cry to all of them: TAKE THE SYSTEM DOWN!!!!!!!!!!

-FT