Hands In The Dark turns a DIY friendship into dreamlike soundscapes

From a party in Besançon to a shared label language

Hands In The Dark starts with a familiar scene from underground music: two people meeting at a party in Besançon, France, and deciding that their shared taste was worth turning into something lasting. Morgan Cuinet and Onito, also identified in regional coverage as Antoine Richard, were already steeped in the city’s punk and DIY ecosystem, where they played in bands, ran labels, and booked shows before the label was even a real project. What could have stayed a local friendship became a curatorial practice, and that is still the best way to understand the imprint: not as a brand built from marketing instinct, but as a long conversation between two friends who trusted the same sound instincts.

That conversation did not stop when geography changed. Cuinet settled in Ornans, France, and Onito moved to Canterbury, England, yet the distance seems to have sharpened the label rather than diluted it. Hands In The Dark says it has been based in Besançon, East France, since 2010, and its current footprint now stretches between Besançon and South East England. The label was born in September 2010, just before Onito moved abroad, and the original plan was tiny: only two or three releases. By early 2015, it had already reached six releases, and today it is approaching a hundred.

A catalog that keeps choosing reduction

What makes Hands In The Dark feel so distinct is not scale, but method. The label’s own framing is broad and open ended, focused on experimental music and singular listening experiences, yet the catalog keeps circling a recognizably restrained aesthetic. A 2024 profile described it as a micro-record label with a post-minimalism profile, and that phrase lands because the common thread is not any one genre badge. It is a will to reduction: fewer gestures, more space, and a stronger sense of atmosphere.

That reduction is why the label still matters to minimal-techno listeners even when it wanders far beyond club syntax. The early connection to loops somewhere between ambient and minimal techno points to a deeper shared logic, one where repetition is not filler but structure. You hear that logic in the label’s broader orbit of ambient electronic music, dream pop, psychedelic rock, and acoustic work, all of it threaded through by a taste for lucid, dreamlike emotional afterglow rather than obvious hooks.

The useful thing about Hands In The Dark is that it treats limitation as a creative engine. It is not trying to sound maximal or definitive. It prefers records that breathe, that leave room for decay, and that let a motif change shape slowly enough for you to notice the grain.

The handmade side of the sound

That sense of tactility runs through the label’s more unusual releases as well. Tape looping, collage, and obsolete or rare machinery recur as working tools rather than gimmicks, which is exactly why the catalog feels so coherent. Andrea Taeggi’s Nattdett is a strong example: it was made with a rare analog computer originally used for Cold War-era flight simulation, the kind of detail that sounds like a conceptual flourish until you hear how naturally it fits the label’s obsession with process.

There is also a practical lesson in the format choices. Hands In The Dark still works in small physical runs, and the label’s site lists Mind Over Mirrors’ Particles, Peds & Pores as a limited edition of 200 vinyl copies. That number matters because it shows the imprint still thinking like a true DIY operation, where scarcity is not prestige theater but part of the economics and the intimacy. These records are made to circulate within a scene that values specificity over excess.

The artists around the label reinforce that reach. Selvhenter, one of its recurring names, won Best Jazz Album at the 2023 Danish Music Awards, a reminder that Hands In The Dark’s taste does not sit neatly inside any one niche. It moves between experimental electronics, improvisation, and textured acoustic forms with the confidence of a label that knows its own center of gravity.

Why the label’s 15-year run still feels current

Hands In The Dark’s history also says a lot about how underground scenes survive. A planned 10th-anniversary event was canceled in 2020 because of the pandemic, but the label regrouped and staged an 11th-anniversary festival in Besançon from 2 to 5 December 2021. That is the practical reality behind the romance: labels like this endure because the people behind them keep showing up, keep curating, and keep converting friendship into infrastructure.

The important part is that this never turned into a nostalgia project. Morgan Cuinet has said the artists on the label share freedom, experimentation, and a refusal to be boxed in, and that description still fits the catalog’s best releases. Even after 15 years, Hands In The Dark reads less like a preserved artifact than a live curatorial system, one that keeps choosing records for their texture, their restraint, and their emotional precision.

That is why the label still connects with minimal-techno ears. It began with two friends in Besançon and ended up with a sound world that understands how far reduction can travel when it is guided by trust, memory, and taste. Hands In The Dark has spent 15 years proving that a DIY friendship can become its own sonic language, and that language still sounds like the future when the room is quiet enough to hear it.