On March 21, 2025, Zurich-based artist 59 Perlen unveiled his latest dawless ambient album, Zerfall . Critical Acclaim for dawless ambient album Zerfall The album has garnered attention from several music

After arrival, we made a little plan which was like follows: Day 1: hooking up our gear and build the dawless Working on the Dawless Dubtechno Set I had actually erased my machine the day before I left home, just The Dawless Dubtechno performance The entire event on Saturday went super smooth. Here´s a video recording of the first part, the Dawless Dubtechno performance. The Dawless Setups I have the habit to 3D scan a lot of my setups and this one was no exception.

Gear I used for this Dawless Jam Since the space in my travel luggage is limited, I tried to use only

Minimalist electronic artist 59 Perlen is set to release his latest dawless ambient album, Zerfall, on on the Soma Lyra-8 synthesizer and encapsulates its raw energy and evolving soundscapes of a fully dawless Dawless Ambient Music with an Authentic Edge Zerfall represents a deep, meditative exploration of ambient With a career spanning 20 years, he has built a reputation for his innovative dawless approach, crafting

Will DAWless stay? community of musicians who work with pure hardware setups, but I notice a slight flattening of pure DAWless The main thing was to produce "DAWless".

This really drove me towards the DAWless approach. this blogpost "Dawless" doesn't mean I don't use Ableton anymore. As I said above, dawless will be your next rabbithole, I promise. Here's an example of a completely dawless performance of mine. Need help building your dawless setup?

Final Goal: Dawless Jam on Massive Radio The final goal of this weekend was a live stream with a dawless pretty concvinced to make this challenge and a create a time filling new set together. 45 Minutes of Dawless

Hello my friends, I hope you’re having a great Monday so far! We’re on a day of bank holidays here in Switzerland (together with many other countries I think) so I finally had the time to record a brandnew jam. And I can tell you, I had so much fun with this one! The track is titled "Kid" and got a little cheesy, but still I love the chord progression of it a lot. My main goal was to exercise jamming with the Squarp and get more pumping tracks with my compressor. It’s actually not that style of music I normally do but here we go :) Some insights about my workflow and the machines Squarp Pyramid: the brain. Its sequencing the Peak and the Digitone, and It also controls the pattern and presets of the entire setup. I didn’t use the song mode, I switched between the few pattern manually during the jam. The chord progression is pretty long, so I wrote it in Ableton beforehand and exported it as a MIDI clip onto the SD Card of the Pyramid. I did the same with the baseline. Editing a 32 bar track can be a pain on this machine. Novation Peak plays the lead arps, sequenced by the Squarp. It’s a simple arp preset that I tweaked. Digitone is only for the bassline and Digitakt plays a little atmosphere sample. I added a bit of bit reduction and modulated it using the LFO. DT also plays that sweet title-giving voice recording. Analog Rytm: Drums, I only used the analog sound engines and no layered samples, and finally the Typhon for some simple pad inserts, I played these live here and there on the little keyboard. Audio Routing A quick word about the audio routing. I plugged the Peak outputs into the Digitone. The sum of these 2 guys goes into my Empress compression pedal where its sidechained using the Kick output of the Analog Rytm. I know, they come out mono that way, but I’m fine with it :D

After a phase of intense work jobs and live shows, I finally got the time to get back to dawless music I have already 4 :D If you ask yourself why I go back to dawless after praising Ableton as my new to-go

New dawless hardware from Erica Synths After checking out some choices at the Superbooth I was pretty Long story short - Tadaaaa here’s my new dawless trinity from Erica Synths: the LXR-02 Drum synthesizer A first dawless jam with the new setup What you think of these machines? Anyone with experiences?

It's time to give you a quick update on my hardware rig. I know most musicians set their stuff up once and then they play on it forever (or for a long time). They have no interest in setting it up over and over again - never touch a running system. And why should they? Wiring can take a long time and, to be honest, everyone is just happy when everything works as it should. After all, you have to deal with 3 different circuits - MIDI, power and audio has to be handled in parallel. I kinda admire these musicians, because I would actually like to handle my setup the same way. But my projects work differently - I usually put my complete setup together for a particual project, and when that's finished, a phase of reorientation follows. I take a piece of equipment out of the chains because I start working on something new, and at some point I take the whole set apart and start completely from scratch. I also buy new hardware at this point, which I then want to integrate into the "new" setup (which unfortunately doesn't automatically mean that I don't buy new hardware at the other times haha). Of course, that permanent wiring, building and dismantling comes with a big advantage: I have become very fast when it comes to hooking my gear in both audio and MIDI chains. Not so long ago, MIDI was really one of my strongest enimies and a real creativity killer. But with each rebuild, I learned more and more and nowadays it's a fairly simple task in my creative process. Using the hardware limitations With every new build, I think about how to deal with the limitations that come along and how the signal flow should look alike. The style of music I want to create takes a massive impact on this! Sometimes I draw a system scheme to get a picture of all connectors and audio chains. That can be done with PowerPoint (yes, I sometimes even download pictures of my synths from the internet and visualise the complete scheme with them!). My mixer, for example, offers a total of 10 inputs (2 Stereo, 6 Mono). But I have many more devices! This automatically means that I have to route some machines to the audio inputs of others to connect more devices than the mixer allows (example: my Peak is routed into the Digitone, which then goes into a compressor > 2 synths, but only uses 1 connection on the mixer). On the other hand, due to the limited total number of possible devices, I simply have to leave out some and limit myself to a handful of gear. MIDI Routing MIDI was a mystery for me for a very long time. Routing usually didn't work and I was quickly frustrated. That is why the Squarp, which I bought 2 years ago, rarely made it to my setup. This changed when I got myself a THRU and a MERGE box. These two guys made everything much easier and in the meantime the Pyramid has become the centre of my setup. It gives the clock for all the other devices in the rig, takes care of preset and pattern management and sequences the synths. Sometimes I write the MIDI patterns with Ableton and import them quickly, especially for long progressions, which makes the workflow easier. The grooveboxes, however, still run their own sequencers because of their workflows which I like a lot. They are only supplied with Pyramid's clock signals and program changes. To be able to modulate a number of different parameters of a synth in parallel, I programmed a Launchpad Pro with some custom modes. The programming is fixed for each setup and doesn't change. Since I don't label the device, I wrote down all CC parameters in an Excel table which helps me to keep an overview about my program. Audio Routing In my current setup, I'm running the synths for pads and leads through a compressor and sidechain their audio with the Kick Output of the Analog Rytm. Unfortunately the compressor works mono only, but I try to overdrive that with stereo effects coming from the other machines. You can hear the pumping quite well in this piece, it was the first jam I did with this constellation: My current equipment At the moment I have the following devices in the rig: Mixer Tascam Model 12 Grooveboxes Elektron Digitakt Electron Analog Rytm MKII Synthesizer Electron Digitone Novation Peak Dreadbox Typhon MIDI Controller Novation Launchpad Pro Squarp Pyramid Arturia Keystep Effects pedals Empress Compressor MKII Strymon Big Sky Auxiliary devices Kenton MIDI Thru Kenton MIDI Merge Cable Management You see, I own a lot of gear! I simply love to use different machines from time to time. And it's also quite a lot of audio cables, midi accessories and power plugs. And how I hate cables! I've often researched how to keep it intelligently clean and looked at other musicians' setups to see how they handle it. Their setups looks usually so clean and so tidy - with mine it simply doesn't work. I'm afraid one of the reasons is that I'm always rebuilding my setup haha Paradoxum. Anyway, I've given up trying to sort out all the strings somehow! I just can't manage it. Cable management is one of the reasons why I regularly take the whole rig apart. Because it forces me to untangle and re-sort all the cables. From this point of view, it would probably make more sense NOT to disassemble the equipment all the time and to have a permanent set. Then it would be easier to tidy up the cables. Setup for gigs By the way. For setups that I create for gigs, the whole thing looks a bit different. I simply can't put all the machines that I want in my luggage. For this purpose, I usually take 2 or 3 machines out of the setup and develop the songs only with these 2. Mostly its the Digitakt (recently also the Analog Rytm), plus a synth and the Pyramid for sequencing and clock control. In the embedded video above I tell you more about my current setup and how I route the audio, which is a bit more practical to explain with a camera than in this text. How is your setup structured? What do you pay attention to?

Last week, I got invited to perform for "Palacio Palace", a cultural hub and virtual venue hosting digital and physical audiovisual experiences. The music is a stripped down version of my 1 hour performance "Shopping Bag" and while the original recording delivered sub-optimal sound quality, you can enjoy the full studio sound with this video. I hope you will like it! Build your own setup If you got lost in MIDI, routing and synths, if you need someone to give track feedbacks, or help building your own setup, be it hardware, hybrid or software based - I offer individual coaching lessons. Book a free trial session now and we can discuss your needs!