In a crowded cultural world, it's hard to be truly distinctive, but Deep Throat Choir have managed it. Their sound is instantly recognisable: female voices, mainly relatively untrained and almost completely unadorned, weaving around one another with generally little more than bass and drums for support. From this simple framework, they manage to make songs by artistes as distinctive as Bjork, Amy Winehouse, house star MK as much their own as their original compositions are. It’s rare, in fact, to find an act that makes you engage with their music so completely on its own terms.

DTC began in 2013 as a very casual gathering of friends to sing together. Founder Luisa Gerstein had music industry experience playing in bands like Landshapes and Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs, and wanted to get back to creative basics. These informal gatherings quickly snowballed to a weekly session which has continued ever since, and the early addition of drummer and arranger Zara Toppin helped create that disctinctive sound, blending experienced and novice musicians together into a cohesive whole.

Since then, as well as releasing their own album Be OK on Bella Union in 2017, they've worked with a range of other individualist artistes. From Liverpool synth-indie trio Stealing Sheep via baroque psychedelicist Cosmo Sheldrake to Brazilian born Berlin electronic chanteuse Dominique De Byington aka Dillon, their collaborations have been as diverse as their source material. Perhaps most prominently, they provided vocals for four songs on UK techno duo Simian Mobile Disco’s 2018 Murmurations album – acting as “human synthesisers” for SMD.

Now they’re back with a sumptuous new single, Camille, on a new imprint. Founded by Gerstein with Anika Mottershaw with Bella Union’s backing, Amorphous Sound aspires to be a formalisation of the DTC collective, allowing collaborative projects by the various members of the sprawling Choir in different configurations. Judging by Camille, with its more complex instrumentation and rich production, both Amorphous Sound and the upcoming second DTC album will be well worth watching out for. We spoke to Gerstein at home in London, to find out more about DTC’s past, present and future.

When the project first began, were there ambitions to release music, or was it purely for the sake of participation?

Initially I hadn’t thought about releasing music no, but it wasn’t just about participation. Gathering regularly with a group of people to sing was a huge incentive, but it was primarily led by a desire to strip everything away, and really focus in on voices, and see what possibilities that opened up sonically. 

Were there any precedents for what you did when you started, either directly in community choirs, or more conceptually?

I was really inspired by moments when group vocals took centre stage in popular music: when the chorus had a moment to shine, and behaved more like an instrument than simply taking the top melody/line. I think specifically at that moment in time, the Dirty Projectors album Bitte Orca was a huge inspiration, or the Roaches – and lots of songs where it’s just percussion and voices, like Laura Nyro and Labelle.  There weren’t loads of choirs around in London that I was aware of at the time, but I definitely took inspiration from Anonymous Choir set up by Nona Invie of Dark Dark Dark, who often turn their hand to one particular album or artiste.  Arranging my favourite songs for voices was a fun way to go deeper into my love for those songs, having never really done covers in previous musical incarnations.

Were there any particular moments when you realised the Choir was turning into something new, distinctive, exciting, or otherwise more than you'd expected?

Even though I hadn’t necessarily imagined recording and releasing music, I did get us performing quite early on – as it’s always nice to have something to work towards, and it’s fun to do, particularly when lots of the singers weren’t necessarily accustomed to it. Our first gig was downstairs in a pub in Stoke Newington, and we could barely fit on the stage, let alone get to mics to go through the PA.  There were probably as many of us on stage as there were in the audience, and it felt really powerful to unleash this big sound and not need amplification, and something about the number of us felt different from performances I had experienced before, more like we were sharing something and the audience was part of it. It was always so electrifying we just wanted to build upon it and do more and more, but was a while before I thought about recording.

There's something very striking about the singers' voices on your records just "being themselves", in a way that reminds me a bit of postpunk and c86 type indie, but seems less common more recently... Do you think there's more pressure within pop culture for women's voices to be either virtuosic or super quirky than there is for male voices?

Thank you! I’m glad it feels that way, but I can’t say it’s something I’ve thought about that much, I’ve always just sung how I sing, and the choir does the same, and that’s evolved into a specific landscape of how our particular voices merge together – I love the moments when single voices shine out, people have really different deliveries and I love hearing that.  I suppose there’s an expectation that our voices should be beautiful, that we need unlearn ourselves - for me, as long as we’re in time and in tune and it has real feeling in it, that’s what matters the most.

Has writing and arranging for this ensemble altered the way you think about songs and how they're structured and arranged?

Not necessarily! I guess initially we were arranging existing songs, so there was a structure in place to work around. With this second album, which we’re in the process of mixing now, a lot of the songs came out of jamming together – there are lots of good players amongst us and it’s been fun to give that more space to come through – so I think there’s always that connection to the live experience... but I’m not dead-set on making them the same thing. It’s been exciting to work with so many different members of the choir on the writing side of things, so there were always lots of different approaches to song structure and style. I think it’s broadened the possibilities of the kinds of genres I feel comfortable moving between. We have this one essential instrument of the choir, the centring of voices, and then it’s fun to feel like the rest of it is really open. 

The Simian Mobile Disco collaboration in particular sounds like it must have been an intense experience: how was it doing that kind of drone/swarming singing for prolonged periods?

A good number of us that recorded on that project had also performed in Swarm, an opera about bee swarming, written by two DTC members, Heloise Tunstall-Behrens and Tanya Auclair – so we had already experimented with working the voice in abstracted ways. It was certainly intense to then have the power of the electronics that SMD bought to the project, and took a lot of rehearsing and mapping to be able to do it live. Performing that music has been one of the most transformative live experiences I’ve ever had – it was a really exhilarating alchemy to be part of.

Can you tell us more about the label and upcoming hopes and plans please?

I wanted to formalise a cohesive space for all of us within Deep Throat Choir making work of own, be it solo or collaborative; so really it's giving a name to a collective that already exists, and making fertile ground for even more collaborative work. Outside the longer-term projects of albums and EPs, I want to have a space where we can create and put stuff out more regularly, sometimes without the context of that bigger project - so singles, one-off experiments.  We will occasionally do bigger projects too though! I mentioned The Swarm, which will be our first release later on this year – and there are some other projects underway.  

Do you still run the choir as a regular get together?  It's super poignant now listening to massed voices when we're all physically separated....

To be honest, we haven’t found a platform through which we can sing together in real-time, I think we’ll have to wait till this is over for that, and I miss it dearly.  But we’re currently working on a song and video which we’re all singing remotely, so that’s been a good way to sing together but physically separated. I feel lucky to be in the mixing stage of our current album, working with Jimmy Robertson – it means I get have them in my ears all the time!

Cover Image: Zora Kuttner

Writer | Joe Muggs

Joe Muggs is a writer, DJ and curator of many years standing, covering both mainstream and underground. His book 'Bass, Mids, Tops', covering decades of UK bass music, is out now via Strange Attractor / MIT Press, and you can subscribe to his newsletter at tinyletter.com/joemuggs