Review – We Spent a Night In The Dark

There’s a church near Chancery Lane in central London that has stood for over a thousand years. On a winter’s evening in January, we were invited inside to witness something special.  

In The Dark is a unique and immersive music experience, conceived by musician and founder Andrea Cockerton. The concept is elegantly simple but profoundly disorienting: 30+ performers – vocalists, orchestral instrumentalists, horns, guitar – fill a darkened space and move freely around the audience, throughout the performance. No stage. No spotlights. No shoes.

That last detail is deliberate. As Andrea explains: “In the dark, guests don’t know how many players there are, or where they’re positioned – they’re always quietly moving around.” The absence of footsteps is part of the illusion – sound seems to materialise, drift across the room, and dissolve again before you can locate its source.

The church, St Andrew’s Holborn, is a quietly extraordinary venue for this kind of event. Its stone walls carry a weight of many centuries, and the space feels sacred without feeling exclusionary – calm and attentive, as though it too is listening. For In The Dark, the seating has been specially reconfigured: rather than rows facing the altar, chairs are arranged inward-facing on either side of the central aisle, creating an intimate arena. The piano sits at the back of the room. The performers are everywhere else.

What makes the spatial dimension of this experience so remarkable is its verticality as well as its width. Performers don’t just move around at floor level – they appear on the first-floor gallery above it too, surrounding you with music from all angles. The result is something Andrea describes as “wrap-around 360 degree sound”, and it truly feels like that.

Darkness is the essential ingredient here, and it’s not simply for atmosphere. “Sight accounts for 80% of our perception,” Andrea explains, “so when you take that away, your brain hears sound differently.” The combination of darkness, constant movement and spatial sound creates a kind of sensory recalibration – your listening becomes, gradually, more acute. Music reveals itself as something more affecting than you might otherwise perceive.

The idea initially began with the team asking themselves how they could create a sound experience which is genuinely different to what people normally encounter. “It was a concept, an experiment, and it took off like a rocket. We kept selling out shows in a couple of hours, which was unheard of.” Andrea notes with delight. “And not only did we sell out really quickly, but the feedback we were getting was just astonishing… along the lines of ‘the best musical experience of my life’, ‘one of those gigs I’ll take to my grave’ and so on.”

There’s a wellness dimension to this that Andrea and her team take seriously too. They’ve received letters from audience members with ADHD who describe the experience as genuinely helpful for their brains, and there are hopes to commission formal research into the physiological and neurological effects of dark sound. “It would be fantastic to get some data,” Andrea says, “and explore whether there’s more that could be done in terms of the relationship between wellness and sound.”

The programme features new arrangements of music by Sigur Rós, Mumford & Sons, Sam Fender, Coldplay and others – versions that, as Andrea puts it, “haven’t ever been heard before.” These are radical reimaginings, stripped of everything familiar (rest assured, the music is far-removed from typical Coldplay material!) and reconstructed for a chamber ensemble moving in the dark.

The evening opened with Festival by Sigur Rós, and it felt like a luxurious invitation to pause, relax and simply let the sound envelop us. Even having attended the pre-show briefing to hear some short demonstrations, the moment the lights went down and the full ensemble began, the effect was immediate: goosebumps.

The set drew to a close poetically with The Dark by SYML – an apt nod to the concept – before returning, full circle, to Festival once more. A thoughtful and elegantly curated programme, without doubt.

Future ambitions extend well beyond the current format. Andrea is clear that there’s a whole world of other possibilities to do “dark sound” – jazz, folk, opera, and eventually electronic music too, though the latter will require a dedicated space and a more complex technical setup. The team is actively fundraising towards that vision, with hopes of eventually acquiring a permanent home. In the meantime, the current configuration – classical and orchestral, human and handcrafted – is more than enough to be extraordinary.

Underpinning all of it is a set of principles Andrea articulates with quiet conviction: exceptional artistic quality, commercial viability, and ethical grounding. Profits from the shows go in part to the music foundation the team established in 2013, supporting people with dementia, children on the autistic spectrum and other causes through the healing power of music.

Walking out of St Andrew’s into the cold London night, I felt I’d experienced something genuinely special. I highly recommend you give your ears a treat and experience it for yourself too. 

Book your tickets at in-the-dark.com 

Photography: Ian Olsson

by Ben Clifford

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