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Diary of Dreams have announced a new live format. Adrian Hates and Felix Wunderer will appear on selected international stages as Diary of Dreams – the electronic duet, focusing on the purely electronic side of the project.

The explanation is honest enough. Rising costs for flights, hotels, travel, crew and staff have made some international shows difficult, sometimes impossible, to finance in the usual full-band format. According to Hates, the alternative would be fewer concerts, fewer countries, fewer chances to reach people outside the safer touring routes. So the project is being reduced for certain shows, at least physically. Smaller team, lower costs, more mobility.

What I appreciate about the announcement is that it does not dress the problem up too much. This is not presented as a sudden artistic revelation after decades of misunderstanding. It is necessity. And maybe because it is necessity, the phrase “back to the roots” lands in a more complicated way.

In a sense, yes. Diary of Dreams were never far from electronics. The programming was always there, under the voice, under the drama, under that particular DoD sadness. The band’s early identity was already built around atmosphere, pulse, repetition and a very controlled kind of darkness. Nobody can seriously argue that Diary of Dreams are now discovering machines for the first time.

But still, I hesitate.

Table of contents

1 What the Diary of Dreams electronic duet changes
2 Diary of Dreams 2026 live dates
3 About Diary of Dreams

What the Diary of Dreams electronic duet changes

For me, Diary of Dreams always worked on several levels at once. Adrian Hates’ voice, of course. That voice is almost a genre in itself: severe, elegant, wounded, commanding without ever becoming theatrical in the cheap sense. Then the lyrics, often more intelligent than the usual dark-scene vocabulary allows, full of inner conflict, accusation, distance, self-observation. But the guitars mattered too. They were not decoration. They gave the songs a body, a pressure, a grain. They stopped the music from becoming too smooth.

That is probably why this news produces mixed feelings. Electronic music is not the problem. It would be absurd to complain about electronics in a scene built on synthesizers, programming and machines. The problem is different. There is a difference between choosing electronic reduction because the songs demand it, and accepting electronic reduction because the economics of touring have become brutal.

Adrian Hates has experimented before. Coma Alliance with Torben Wendt of Diorama opened a different shared space, more collaborative, more cross-pollinated. .com/kill with Gaun:A moved into a colder, more direct electronic form. Some experiments worked better than others, which is normal. What they all showed is that Hates is not an artist trapped inside one fixed arrangement. He can strip things down, bend the language, move sideways from Diary of Dreams and still remain recognisable.

But Diary of Dreams is not just another vehicle. It carries history. It carries the weight of rooms, tours, records, line-ups, arrangements, expectations. It carries that strange bond between programmed melancholy and live force. A Diary of Dreams song can survive in a purely electronic version, yes. The question is whether it changes character when the physical band body is reduced.

And it will change. Of course it will. A live guitarist is not just the guitar sound. A drummer is not just the beat. A musician on stage is movement, friction, timing, small mistakes, resistance, heat. A laptop can carry the arrangement. It can do it cleanly, sometimes more reliably than a tired band in a difficult venue. But it cannot look back at the singer. It cannot push against the room. It cannot make the same kind of risk.

This has been happening for years with drums. Many bands in the darker electronic scene no longer tour with live drums. Some never did, some use hybrid setups, some rely on backing tracks, and in many cases it makes sense. Nobody wants to be naive about money. But now one wonders whether guitars are next. Is this where underground touring is going: two people, a laptop, a few controllers, and the ghost of a full band behind them?

That may sound harsh, but it is not meant as an attack on Diary of Dreams. Quite the opposite. Their announcement is interesting because it says aloud what many artists are probably already calculating in private. How many people can we still afford to take on the road? Which parts of the live sound are essential? Which parts can be programmed? Which parts will the audience miss? Which parts will they accept losing because everyone knows how expensive everything has become?

There is sadness in that. Not melodrama, just sadness. Artists who spent decades building entire musical worlds now have to redesign those worlds around hotel prices, flight routes, fuel costs, crew fees and promoter risk. That is the part that hurts. It is not the laptop. It is the reason the laptop becomes the solution.

So yes, “back to the roots” is partly true. Diary of Dreams have an electronic root. Adrian Hates can stand inside that reduced format without betraying the project. Felix Wunderer is not a random technician added to make the files run. If the duet is carefully shaped, it could become something genuinely strong: colder, more intimate, perhaps closer to the skeleton of the songs. Less rock pressure, more nerve. Less full-band drama, more exposed architecture. But if it becomes simply the cheaper version of the full show, people will feel that too.

The important detail is that Diary of Dreams are not announcing the death of the band. Hates makes it clear that the full line-up continues to exist, and that the duet format applies when the show is billed specifically as Diary of Dreams – the electronic duet. That distinction matters. It keeps the door open. It says: this is another form, not the final replacement.

Still, the announcement leaves a question hanging over the scene. What do we lose when live music becomes more portable? What do we gain? More countries, more shows, more chances for people to see artists who might otherwise skip their region completely. That matters. But we may also lose some of the human surplus that made concerts feel different from playback with lights.

Maybe the future of underground music will be more modular: full band where possible, electronic duet where necessary, acoustic or semi-acoustic versions when the setting demands it, festival versions, club versions, survival versions. Maybe that is not entirely bad. Flexibility can be creative. Limitation can produce focus.

But I would rather we name the pressure honestly. This is not only an artistic turn. It is also a financial wound. And Diary of Dreams, by speaking about it so directly, have given us more than a tour-format update. They have given us a small, uncomfortable picture of where live music stands now. Back to the roots? Maybe. But also forward into a future where even established bands have to travel lighter, count harder, and hope that what remains on stage is still enough to carry the dream.

Diary of Dreams 2026 live dates

July 4, 2026 – Hude, Germany – Burning Pants Festival
July 17, 2026 – Bolków, Poland – Castle Party 2026
July 18, 2026 – Königstein, Germany – Festung Königstein
July 26, 2026 – Köln, Germany – Amphi Festival
September 6, 2026 – Deutzen, Germany – Nocturnal Culture Night 2026
September 12, 2026 – Rotterdam, Netherlands – Baroeg Open Air 2026
November 19, 2026 – Schwerin, Germany – Zenit Schwerin
November 20, 2026 – Braunschweig, Germany – KufA Haus
November 21, 2026 – Bielefeld, Germany – Stereo Live Club
November 22, 2026 – Oberhausen, Germany – Kulttempel
November 25, 2026 – Karlsruhe, Germany – Die Stadtmitte
November 26, 2026 – Wiesbaden, Germany – Schlachthof Wiesbaden
November 27, 2026 – Jena, Germany – F-Haus
November 28, 2026 – Bremen, Germany – Kulturzentrum Lagerhaus

About Diary of Dreams

Diary of Dreams is the darkwave project of Adrian Hates, formed in Düsseldorf, Germany in 1989. Built around Hates’ voice, programmed rhythms and guitar, the project became one of the central names in German dark-scene music across albums such as “Cholymelan”, “Bird Without Wings”, “Nigredo” and “Nekrolog 43”. Hates has run the project through its own label, Accession Records, and remained its constant creative centre while the live line-up changed over the years.

Recent Diary of Dreams activity includes the orchestral reworking “Under a timeless Spell” and the “Dead End Dreams” series on Accession. The electronic-duet format adds another live configuration alongside the full band, applied to shows billed specifically as Diary of Dreams – the electronic duet, beginning with the project’s announced 2026 dates.

Words by Karo Kratochwil.

Karo Kratochwil

Based in Wrocław, I work as a music journalist and photographer covering electro, industrial, EBM, gothic, and darkwave. My work includes features and live coverage, as well as concert, portrait, promo, and theater photography. What interests me most is the connection between artistic intention, what the work communicates, and what unfolds live on stage, all in pursuit of the bigger picture behind the music.

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