Even the Feral Choir’s inventor, Phil Minton, admits that the words feral and choir are strange bedfellows. “It’s sort of a daft idea, isn’t it?” he says with wry amusement, reached at his U.K. home. “It’s a contradiction. A choir is a really unferal thing.”

It’s true that vocal ensembles are inherently social organizations; savagery is one quality that’s usually missing from their makeup. But Minton’s aim is to usher the wild and the uncanny into the realm of vocal music, which he’s been doing as a soloist since the 1970s; more recently, the 66-year-old Londoner has been training others to free their own creative impulses through singing.

Minton himself is one of the world’s great vocal improvisers: not only does he have extraordinary range and flexibility, but he’s also invented an array of extended techniques that have become further popularized through the work of younger artists such as Mike Patton and Christine Duncan. And he’s been generous with his muse: since 1992, he’s been leading voice workshops for musicians, dancers, and actors. But the Feral Choir is aimed at nonperformers, with special emphasis on the marginalized and the dispossessed.

“I’ve been doing these workshops on and off for the past 15 years,” says Minton, who leads one such class and performance at the Carnegie Community Centre on Wednesday (February 7). (For info call Rika Uto at 604-665-3003.) “But four or five years ago I did one in France, as part of the Le Mans Festival, and they wanted me to do it with some local people from a housing estate, what you’d call social housing. And the reaction was fantastic!”

What Minton found was that people are secretly dying to sing, despite the shyness and social pressures that keep them quiet. So he’s developed some techniques to bring first-time singers out of their shells, and he’s been teaching them in prisons and community centres, as well as at schools and music festivals, to universally good effect.

“I start with laughter, because it’s the weirdest thing that we do with our voice, really,” he explains. “That sort of gets people going. I get them to explore what their voices are doing when they laugh, or when they make these other noises that we make.

“But I try to keep within the positive sounds,” he adds. “A lot of people, when they think they’re going to be improvising, they like to cough. But I’m like ”˜No, no, don’t do that.’ I just find that one of the most negative sounds; when people are ill, you want to keep away from them!”

Once the workshop participants are comfortable, Minton leads them toward a performance: he’ll break the group up into smaller units, give them specific sounds to improvise on, then direct them with his own voice. The resulting “choral soundscapes” can be both startling and surprisingly accomplished.

“Some absolutely fantastic music has happened through this,” he says. “That’s the one thing I’m most knocked out by. I did this with 200 kids in Zurich, and if you heard it you wouldn’t know what it was. It sounds like some kind of rich electronic music that’s probably been manipulated in the studio, but it’s just acoustic children’s voices.”

Phil Minton plays the Vancouver Community College’s King Edward Campus Auditorium on Wednesday (February 7) and the Ironworks on Thursday (February 8), as part of the Time Flies Improvised Music Festival.