Well, that’s a wrap. Once again, I’ll end the year by saying this was a weird year. 2025, like 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023…and yes 2024, brought a lot of things we didn’t see coming. The theme of the past five years seems to be “expect the unexpected.”

Lots of upheaval in the musical instrument industry (and the world) has meant our costs went up dramatically this year, often unpredictably so. As a result, we’ve really leaned into streamlining our operations. Earlier this year, we announced the discontinuation of silver modules. More recently, we announced the end of metal replacement panels in general, in addition to the discontinuation of several paneled versions of our platform modules. While the firmwares remain available and free to swap, panels will no longer be available for most of the Alia, Legio, and Versio modules. 

But it hasn’t been all darkness and despair! We released a few things we’re really proud of (Confundo Funkidos, Mimetic Digitwolis, Granulita Versio), and we have been hard at work on some big things we hope to see next year. We paired up with Altadena Musicians to help folks who lost musical gear in the fires in January and met some really great folks! We started a Discord server and get to chat with some of you regularly! We got to do some really fun events and see some of you in person. We upped the ante on our weekly team meetings and instituted time for “Fun Facts” at the end of each meeting (a personal favorite was when Patrick revealed his photo can be found on Wikipedia!). We remain a 1% for the Planet partner, and found lots of ways to give, from our monetary donations to our existing partners to volunteer time that each of us spent helping some of the great non-profits doing environmental work. We spent a lot of time working on projects that really excite us, and we’re excited for next year and what it can bring.

And personally we had some fun (and a touch of stress) too. Below each of us will share a little about our 2025 in review.

Markus

2025 ended up being full of many, many more ups and downs than I expected. The year started with an evacuation from one of the LA fires – we were very lucky, and after a week of stress returned home to a layer of ash covering everything in our apartment…. and I  immediately got sick for the first of a few times in the coming months. In the midst of a surprisingly eventful beginning of the year, my (now) wife and I were also planning and preparing our very DIY wedding.

The day itself was wonderful, and we finally got to decompress for a few weeks on our honeymoon in Indonesia. Later in the year, we adopted a dog, Kora, and have been enjoying our first holiday season as a family together. 

While 2025 hasn’t been what I expected it to be in a lot of ways, I’ve still gotten to work on some uniquely interesting projects at work, like Mimetic Digitwolis, and some of my personal favorite releases, like Granulita Versio and the upcoming Simul. 

Some of my favorite artists put out some very fun albums this year. Top of mind are Vaultage 004 by Space Laces, Stealing Fire by Virtual Riot, and, of course, F*CK U SKRILLEX YOU THINK UR ANDY WARHOL BUT UR NOT!! <3 by Skrillex et al. It’s always nice to see creatives release art they clearly enjoyed making.

I’ve also kept up with my hobbies. I’ve been learning about water chemistry and burr geometries to make better coffee – it’s been a heavily caffeinated year – and managed to make espresso while evacuated and on a couple of camping trips. It’s important to prioritize. 

I’ve also learned the challenging, yet ever-important, skill of carpet stain removal. Thanks, Kora. 

Patrick

This year kicked off with a visit to my second home, Los Angeles. The after party performance at Buchla & Friends was a moment that reminded me why I love this community. In between giving demos for our gear at Knobcon, I squeezed in a chilled out quad modular set and reconnected with friends old and new. Back home, the DC synth community evolved into new projects, like bridging acoustic and electronic instruments with local jam sessions and hosting modular synthesis workshops at the Virginia public library.

Creatively, this was the year of rediscovery. Mimetic Digitwolis pulled me back into the world of MIDI with excitement and a rewiring of my studio. I finally brought home a Prophet 12, my favorite synth. I also released six albums with twenty five songs, getting years of unfinished music off my hard drives and into the world. I’ve changed my eating habits and have been cooking killer meals and leveling up my coffee game, thanks to Markus. Through all of this, I pushed myself through health issues and navigated the hardest moment of the year, losing my mother. 

I’m ending 2025 with more clarity about who I am as an artist and more gratitude for the people around me, at Noise Engineering and beyond.

As far as my favorite musical experience of the year, it has to be seeing Snakes of Russia on tour. The whole evening was a welcomed weekday getaway for me, travelling down to Richmond, VA  from Maryland, then chatting over a fav local pizza spot with Joseph and our friends at BoredBrain, then driving back home that night. 

Oh, and I supported our local music store Chuck Levin’s and picked up a Yamaha flugelhorn on Black Friday. Between the new horn and the trumpet I’ve had for decades, I’m setting the stage for blending brass and modular in ways I’m genuinely thrilled about.

Stephen

What a dumpster fire of a year. It started with the LA fires. Kris and I watched the Palisades Fire from our front window. Luckily we are far enough away that our only impact was a lot of ash. Many of our customers were directly impacted. Sometimes this was complete destruction, sometimes smoke damage, and sometimes just an inability to live at home for many months. One poignant moment for me was when I was cleaning up the ash in the backyard, I found one large piece of ash that had previously been sheet music. The staff was still visible as black on black on the 1"x2" piece of paper ash.

Then came the tariff roller coaster. The majority of our raw materials are not available from US suppliers. Some are available but are as much as 10x more expensive than overseas suppliers. This is unavoidable fact, not politics. We were once again put in the situation of figuring the balance between raising prices and staying in business. We spent a lot of effort (along with our contract manufacturer which is located in California) trying to do everything we could to cut costs without increasing prices. Sadly around mid year our manufacturer decided their best path forward was to phase out of contract manufacturing onshore and move their own manufacturing needs offshore.

That was quite the bomb for us. There were then months of talking to other companies and factories and working up a plan for the future. We have re-evaluated almost every aspect of our business in the last few months to try to re-optimize it for the current conditions. We are still in the middle of this transition though thanks to the help of some other companies in the music instrument community we have found some options that seem great. Special thanks to 1010music and Erica Synths/Girts for their more than generous help.

Another bummer for this year is we spent a lot of time prototyping hardware for a line of more toylike table top products but were unable to find a manufacturer that could build them for a price that we felt the market would bear. So that project ended up on the dumpster fire.

And another fallout from these changes is our guitar-pedal line will be frozen for a while. Sadly we won't have the resources to finish the many pedals we have in development in the near future. I very much look forward to when we can again work on this project.

On the upside we released a couple updates to modules that were in sore need of modernization. Neither CF2 or MD2 are revolutionary, but they are significant improvements over the originals. The CF in particular was one of our most requested modules to produce again. Expect to see some more modernization redesigns as we will be phasing out certain parts as we move manufacturing.

We also released what has turned out to be a very popular firmware for Versio, Granulita. The core code for this is years old. I was very happy to find a product for it and to see people making music with it!

A few modules are ready for release in early 2026. Most of these should have been out in 2025 but due to the manufacturing shake up, they got delayed. One of these we showed at the LA Pedal Expo in June: a 4HP stereo multimode (31 modes!) virtual-analog filter. We have made a ton of progress on some of our bigger dream projects that have been cooking on the back burner for years which I really hope to be able to start showing off mid next year.

And the winner of Stephen’s album of the year goes to… Never were the way she was!

Kris

What to say about 2025? You can’t be an Angeleno and not talk about how hard a year it was here, from fires to political instability. But despite that, a bright spot for me has been how Angelenos really have shown up for each other this year, more than I could have expected. I remain enamored with California. Stephen has covered a lot of the trials and tribulations we’ve had this year, so I won’t rehash them. I’ll try to focus on some great things from this year.

First, professionally, while things have been extremely challenging, this community is so welcoming that we are confident we have a good path forward for next year, not only in manufacturing, but in ways to streamline purchases for customers. In this transition, a lot of modules will be end-of-lifed due to parts or sales (or both haha), but the backbone products (e.g., our platforms) aren’t going anywhere. I’ll be re-engineering everything to be built with our new partners, so there may be some time where inventory is spotty, but I’m excited for where I think we’ll be in a year.

Personally, Stephen and I have gotten to go to some really fantastic stuff this year! A year measured in music? Autechre, Moderns, Party Nails, the LA Phil, Caravan Palace, and so much more. I also did some Citizen Science with some friends, and got to wander around Southern California collecting soil samples for environmental DNA testing…it was great to do science again, but it was also a great excuse to go hiking in Angeles National Forest, Ojai, and beyond! 

Of course I also had a lot of circus-y fun too. In April, I donned my best fake velvet to do an aerial silks performance to Sweet’s Ballroom Blitz. Friends, I knew that song was fast…but you never know just how fast until you have to climb 20 feet in the air for the third time in under two minutes and also swing across the stage like Tarzan…In June, I got to perform a duo piece I’d been wanting to do for years: an aerial chains piece to Snakes of Russia’s …And Raise your Hands to the Sky. I had been envisioning this chains performance since the first time I heard it back in 2020. Preparations included actually learning how to do chains. And then finally, in December, I convinced my friend Nicole to do a silks performance in which I play a doll and she plays a little girl and there’s a dream sequence…I didn’t think I’d be wandering around in doll clothes and French braids at this stage in my life, but here we are.

Musically, I have mostly noodled on Stephen’s modular case, but I hope to get back to more in 2026 (I have a case built for our annual vacation). I wrangled myself a Hydrasynth at long last, and a friend sent me an Oxi One sequencer to use with it. I haven’t had the time I need to really get my feet wet with it, sadly, but I’m having fun! I also grabbed an Arturia AstroLab 37 which sounds fabulous and is a hell of a lot easier to pack on vacation than the DX7! Finally, my good friend/brother-from-another-mother Matt got me an acoustic guitar. I am confident I will be bad at playing it for a long time, but he has assured me that that’s just part of it. I have tried to learn to play guitar at least four times, so maybe this one will stick!

I wind down 2025 grateful for the really amazing Noise Engineering team and that we made it through the year, my circle of wonderful friends, my family (including my puppos), and my health. May 2026 be a beautiful year for us all.