Ron Edge has suggested that we name this edition – the audio commentary part of it – “Stall the Crowd.”   Some ghost has got in the Skype Recording Machine Bill is using and flipped and twisted Bill and my conversation about Helix Vol. 4 No. 3 into what Bill names a “disaster.”  But it is also a fanciful flop.   Why would this latest instance of our routine conversations via Skype between Seattle and Lima sound like it has now been joined by whales?  These third parties are not without their appeal.  You may prefer them.  Long ago when I first called Bill on Skype I heard the whales, although Bill did not.  Well then, I thought, are these the whales that have not made it south of the Panama – our very own gratuitous but graceful sirens, our ghosts of Namus past and all the other Orcas in Puget Sound formally captured by brave but mad whaleboys.  But Vol. 4 No.3’s  recording oddities are more elaborate than its orca-acapella. Bill continues, “Our voices are out of sync, and getting worse as the recording goes on, until finally we are often talking at the same time on different subjects.” We might do that anyway – but not like this.   Then it comes to Bill – the rescue by psychedelic insight.  He concludes, “I may have saved it by heavy cutting and accenting the tone of an acid trip . . . some of the passages are quite lucid, others incomprehensible, but there is method here.  It is something like two stoners talking.”  Still Ron advices “Stall the crowd.”  But how?  For balance we need something that has clear and familiar continuity and, it turns out, we have it from Bill as well with his guitar relaxing on his and Kel’s Peruvian pallet and singing Dylan’s “Visions of Johanna” under Kel’s direction.  Here’s the link. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IkZjEZMcLoI

B.White and P. Dorpat

[audio:http://edge-archive.com/audio/04-03.mp3|titles=HelixVol 4 No 3]