In The Dark has announced its first UK-wide tour this autumn, expanding from sold-out London residencies to performances in cathedrals and abbeys.
Created by Bury-born musician Andrea Cockerton, the show began in Cambridge before its London runs. Audiences wear eye masks throughout, listening as musicians perform around them in complete darkness.
How the performances work
Each performance lasts 70 to 75 minutes, with approximately 30 unamplified musicians and vocalists moving silently through the venue around the seated audience.
There is no stage or lighting, and the setlist remains undisclosed until the performance finishes. Tickets cost £38–£48.
The autumn programme features two formats with different repertoires: HUSH and the newer PULSE. HUSH includes arrangements of music by Sigur Rós, Coldplay, Ólafur Arnalds and Mumford & Sons.
Where the tour will go
Alongside continuing London dates, the tour will visit:
- Bristol Cathedral
- Chichester Cathedral
- St Albans Cathedral
- Tewkesbury Abbey
- Guildford Cathedral
- All Saints Hove
The history of listening without sight
The format has precedents in acousmatic music, which presents sound without a visible source. Its modern history reaches back to French musique concrète in the 1950s.
A strand known as “cinéma pour l’oreille”, or “cinema for the ear”, applies film-like dramatic structure to sound alone. Its practitioners include Francis Dhomont and Robert Normandeau.
Normandeau’s Montreal concert series, Rien à voir, translates as “nothing to see”. The Montreal festival Akousma developed from that series and has presented annual commissioned works in this format since 2005.
These works commonly use multichannel speaker arrays, sometimes called an acousmonium, and are frequently presented in darkened rooms. Acousmatic concerts have also used galleries, planetariums and black-box spaces.
Spanish sound artist Francisco López has spent decades presenting blindfolded performances using his archive of field recordings in more than 70 countries.
López characterises the blindfold as a “voluntary commitment to listening”.
The term acousmatic is associated with Pythagoras, who is believed to have taught students from behind a screen to keep their attention on his words. Accounts of the practice credit it with exceptional recall.
