The plywood booth is simple and sturdily constructed. It looks like an outhouse, or an ice-fishing shanty. Except for the words stenciled, stark and alluring, on the door: enter. speak.
Halsey Burgund wants to talk to you. Or to listen, really. On January 7 at the Museum of Science, the 32-year-old Bedford musician wants you to come inside his tall, dimly lit box and read a poem. Or maybe just chat with him about the weather, or your weekend plans. His project is called Bring Your Own Voice, and he wants you to do just that. It’s not hard. After all, Burgund says, “you can’t go anywhere without your voice.”
On Saturday afternoon, Burgund — who last appeared in these pages speaking out for file-sharing — hopes to talk to 20 or 30 people, committing their unique cadences, inflections, and timbres to tape. He plans to take these inimitable voices back to his studio, listen to them closely, pick and choose words and phrases, arrange them and rearrange them, loop them, echo them, and set them to music. “I treat the voices themselves as instruments,” he says. “I might have 16 tracks of what one would traditionally call an instrument, and then 16 tracks of people speaking. The little clips I distilled earlier, I stick them in and move them around.”
Since starting the BYOV project in late 2004, Burgund has “collected” more than 100 voices on hours of tape. The songs he’s created with them — many released on his debut record, Words and Voices (Aesthetic Evidence) — are both textual and textural, using evocative phrases and the soundsof voices themselves in songs that range from ambient washes to pulsing techno reveries to tricky, rhythmic indie rock.
Burgund intermingles strangers’ personal reflections — “storms make me lonely,” “my partner and I understand each other completely,” “I do not have much to be proud of in my life” — into foreboding piano chords and vertiginous whorls of strings. He sculpts sound using chortles and chuckles, monastic chants, loops of two very different voices repeating the same line: “sneaking along a circuitous path.” Sometimes the imagery is entrancingly oneiric (“time slowed down yesterday morning as I lay in bed, chitchatting with my dreams”). Sometimes it’s humorously matter-of-fact (a man talks at length about trying to kill a spider “the size of a freakin’ cat”).
The sum total is a shifting aural tapestry, one that’s as powerful for its affecting authenticity as it is reflective of the human experience. That’s why Burgund’s only advice for potential speakers is as simple as it is clichéd: be yourself.
“I’m really not looking for people to go in there and ham it up and be somebody they’re not,” he says. “I’ve found that people who try to act, people who are very aware of the fact that they’re being recorded, it comes off as a little bit forced. The best nuggets I’ve collected are people behaving completely naturally.”
