Fifteen years of Hands In The Dark’s Beautiful Lucid Dreaming
Morgan Cuinet and Onito, the two co-conspirators behind the label Hands In The Dark, met at a party in their home city of Besançon and immediately hit it off. A historic city in eastern France not far from the Swiss border, Besançon has a thriving underground punk and DIY scene, and the pair were both active participants, playing in bands, running labels, and booking shows and tours. “Our friendship blossomed in bars and at concerts, where we quickly discovered our mutual appreciation for similar musical styles,” says Cuinet.
But Hands In The Dark didn’t grow out of the Besançon scene so much as it sprang from the methods and strategies that the pair learned along the way. In fact, the label didn’t really come into being until both left town—Cuinet to Ornans, a small French town famed as the birthplace of painter Gustave Courbet, and Onito overseas to Canterbury, a picturesque cathedral city a short drive southeast of London. “Life took us geographically apart,” says Onito. “But we used the label as a way to keep our connections alive—even to enhance and strengthen them over the years.”
Now, 15 years old and approaching a hundred releases, Hands In The Dark remains a firmly DIY enterprise—albeit one that has long departed any punk rock orthodoxy. “Our musical preferences have evolved a fair bit,” acknowledges Cuinet. “Yet we hope and believe a certain coherence emerges.”
These days, Hands In The Dark’s releases explore a space somewhere between ambient, kosmische, electroacoustic music, and free improvisation—an intrepid and exploratory sound, often with the strangely vivid quality of a lucid dream, or a Pavlovian jolt of memory. Groups like Tomaga and Selvhenter toy with abstraction and deconstruction, even as their music ripples with emotion or sparkles with the dynamism of in-person collaboration. One throughline is a fascination for sonic manipulation, be it the tape looping and collage techniques employed by Läuten der Seele, or recordings that exploit the characteristics of defunct or vintage machinery—like Andrea Taeggi’s Nattdett, made using an analog computer at the Willem-Twee synthesis studio in the Netherlands that was initially employed for flight simulation in the Cold War era.
A key early connection for the label came shortly after Onito moved to the UK in 2011. There, he caught a gig by space-rock group The Oscillation and became fast friends with the group’s Tom Relleen. Relleen was a force of nature on the London experimental scene, a co-founder of the record shop Phonica and a booking agent for DIY agency Julie Tippex. “We ended up working on a certain number of projects together,” says Onito. “Either touring with the Oscillation—I’d be doing their live sound—booking tours for some of the bands of his delightful roster, or releasing music together.”
Relleen soon became an unofficial third member of Hands In The Dark, and an influence on its evolving direction. When he and his Oscillation bandmate, the drummer and percussionist Valentina Magaletti, decided to begin their new duo project, Tomaga, Hands In The Dark was a natural home. Releasing their debut album Futura Grotesk was a turning point for the label, says Cuinet. “It was the beginning of our collaboration with this extraordinary group. And it made us realize that we should offer even more innovative, radical, and avant-garde visions. Without this album, I’m not sure we would have released albums by Brian Case, Valby Vokalgruppe, Razen, Piotr Kurek, Selvhenter… It helped break down a lot of barriers in our minds.”
Tragically, Relleen died of cancer in 2020. But before that, he was a prolific contributor to Hands In The Dark, not just through Tomaga, but through side projects like Staran Wake and Papivores—or simply recommending new music that might fit the label. Many acts on the label’s roster have come through a recommendation from a trusted source, although the pair are still open to chance encounters—the surprise demo that lands out of the blue, or the live performance that takes you by surprise. Onito recalls stumbling on the Lithuanian electronic duo ugne&maria playing at a church in Belgium in 2024 and being awestruck. “It was one of those rare gigs with a particular kind of mystical aura around it,” he remembers. “The band playing in the middle of a misty concrete room, by the natural light of the stunning sunset coming through the glass.”
Despite the several hundred miles that separate them, Cuinet and Onito have found a way to operate the label mutually in the day-to-day. They’ve found a natural separation of tasks—Morgan handles artwork, promo, social media, distribution, and shipping orders, while Onito handles communications and masters some releases. It’s a mark of their hive mind that they still operate from a single email address. “When we see each other, three or four times a year, we talk very little about the label’s business,” says Cuinet.
Hands In The Dark’s longevity, thinks Onito, is that it remains a labor of love. “We run it as a non-profit organization—hence free of financial pressure, since we don’t rely on its success for our livelihood,” he says.
“Even though the last few years have been somewhat very challenging regarding the costs of running our operation and the public’s changing relationship with music—and art in general—we continue to hold dear that romantic notion of culture as a fundamental expression of humanity,” adds Cuinet. “The shared goal, he says, remains the same: “To consistently release projects that genuinely inspire us, things that are original, singular and adventurous—and occasionally even turn out to be radical.”
Here are seven highlights from the Hands In The Dark catalog.
Tomaga
Intimate Immensity
Without hesitation, Cuinet and Onito point to Intimate Immensity as the most special record in the Hands In The Dark catalog. The product of two years of recording in Tomaga’s bunker space, it was completed shortly before Tom Relleen’s death from stomach cancer in 2020. Despite the sadness of the occasion, Intimate Immensity captures exactly what made the duo great. Valentina Magaletti’s drumming is astonishing throughout—sometimes coolly metronomic, other times improvisatory, other times gesturing in the direction of West African music or gamelan. Relleen, meanwhile, reaches for a mixture of analog instruments, electronics, and found sounds, conjuring up alien timbres or melodies that linger in the memory like a half-remembered dream. “Tomaga was a way for Val and Tom to create music without any pressure or artistic limitation—to be who they totally wanted to be as musicians,” says Onito. “I spent hours and hours listening to demos at Tom’s, where they often recorded. They were really prolific and absolutely brilliant in every way.”
Brian Case
Tense Nature
As well as recording for Hands In The Dark, Relleen was a trusted confidant who recommended artists to the label. One such artist was Brian Case, already something of a legend in alternative rock circles, due to his role in bands including Disappears, 90 Day Men, and The Ponys. Case was looking for a home for his debut album of solo music, which was something of a departure from his previous work: A set of circling abstract electronic pieces pieced together from fragments of sampled guitar or drums. “We were immediately drawn to this music, made up of loops somewhere between ambient and minimal techno,” says Cuinet. Hands In The Dark went on to release four of Case’s solo albums. “Brian has always been adventurous in his musical propositions—it’s this creative freedom that we admire in him.”
Läuten der Seele
Die Reise zur Monsalwäsche
Sometime around the middle of the last decade, Cuinet got hooked on the music of Brannten Schnüre, a shadowy and obscure experimental folk duo from Bavaria. He decided to make contact with the group’s Christian Schoppik—which was easier said than done. “He had no website, no Instagram, no Facebook,” says Cuinet. “I finally managed to send him a message to tell him how special I found his music, and he replied that he was starting to work on his first solo album. The timing was perfect!” Schoppik’s solo work as Läuten der Seele blends acoustic instrumentation with samples drawn from film and classical music to create dense, phantasmagoric audio collages with a haunting, nostalgic quality. “Since 2022, we have released three Läuten der Seele albums, and I hope we will have the chance to release more,” says Cuinet. “They are all fantastic, but the narrative, diversity, and depth that this one offers make it stand out.”
Schatterau
Wir gingen durch leere Stunden
Another aficionado of Christian Schoppik’s work is Daniel Jahn, operator of the Hamburg record shop and label Bureau B and curator of the compilation Gespensterland, which brought together haunting music by Schoppik and other fellow travelers. Jahn is also a member of Schatterau, whose music feels like a fresh manifestation of the sort of melancholy, nostalgic music collected on Gespensterland. Working with tape loops, hushed voice, and live instrumentation, the duo assemble a suite of music that works to a kind of dream logic, mysterious and evocative. Wir gingen durch leere Stunden is their third album for Hands In The Dark. “We are stunned and excited about the constant progression of their music with each album release,” says Onito. “They really blossomed with this new album, which brings a lot of refreshing ideas, departing a bit from lo-fi and loops and drawing inspiration from classical music.”
Valby Vokalgruppe
Solids For Voices
Much of the music on Hands In The Dark employs sonic processing of some sort, so on the surface, an album like Valby Vokalgruppe’s Solids For Voices feels like a departure of sorts: A collection of largely a cappella music made by an all-female vocal ensemble from Denmark. Still, Valby Vokalgruppe are closely aligned with Hands In The Dark’s mission to foreground boundary-pushing sounds. Solids For Voices feels geometric in its design, using repetition and layering to create complex, interlocking pieces with a trance-inducing quality. Much of the album was composed by ensemble leader Anja Jacobsen, but on “Delfisk Hymne” they look back, interpreting a piece by Greek composer Athénaios, who inscribed it on a stone in Delphi in 128 BC. “It’s quite different from all our previous releases, but in reality, we’ve always sought to explore other aesthetics,” says Cuinet. “Since the album’s release, they’ve performed two live shows, and I had the chance to attend one of them in Geneva, in a former factory that has been transformed into a contemporary art center—one of the most beautiful concerts I’ve experienced in recent years.”
Razen
Robot Brujo
Hands In The Dark’s first experience of Razen came at Belgium’s Meakusma Festival back in 2018, where the group played a Sunday morning set at the Neo-Gothic Friedenskirche in Eupen to an audience still shaking off their hangovers from the night before. “Their blend of ancient instruments and more modern, electronic sounds completely captivated us at the time,” recalls Cuinet. Two years later, Hands In The Dark released Robot Brujo, on which Razen further honed their deep listening style—a set of six improvisations for strings and wind instruments that explored minuscule variations in timbre, timing, and vibration. “It is, in our humble opinion, an overlooked masterpiece of rare intensity, leading to four more fantastic releases with the band and its members,” says Cuinet.
Josiah Steinbrick
Meeting Of Waters
Josiah Steinbrick is a skilled multi-instrumentalist and producer who’s worked with everyone from Danger Mouse to Devendra Banhart to Charlotte Gainsbourg. But Meeting Of Waters captures him flying solo, working with a small assembly of instruments—synthesizers, vibraphone, marimbaphone, idiophone, bells, and gongs—with production assistance and guidance from friend and collaborator Cate Le Bon. The result is a minimalist, somewhat hermetic sound that sits at the crossroads of ambient music and free improvisation. It first saw the light of day as a limited cassette on Leaving Records, before Hands In The Dark prepared it for a wider vinyl issue in 2019. “We obsessively listened to this album for several weeks following its release,” says Cuinet. “We feel privileged to have the chance to prolong the existence of these extraordinary sonic creations, crafted with such precision and skill.”
Aaron Moore & Erik K Skodvin
Instead of rain i bring a hat
Instead of rain i bring a hat found its way to Hands In The Dark through the label’s friendship with the Norwegian musician Erik K Skodvin. “Erik runs the label Miasmah, which we’ve long loved and highly recommend—he has released incredible artists, including Gabriel Saloman, Andrea Belfi, Marcus Fjellström, and many more,” says Cuinet. One day Skodvin mentioned his ongoing remote collaboration with Aaron Moore, a member of the UK improvisational unit Volcano The Bear. What had started as a tentative email correspondence had gradually grown into a darkly cinematic orchestral piece, weaving together piano, cello, drums, harp, keening vocals, and a mix of homemade and electronic instruments. Hands In The Dark released it back in 2018. “It’s a perfect reflection of what the label stands for and how it works,” says Cuinet. “Exploring fascinating universes, without artistic, physical, or geographical constraints.”
