Berlin School Innovators Ian Boddy and Harald Grosskopf Co-Pilot New Release, using Sonic Tools Including AJH Synth Chance Delay

Sunderland, UK, 22 April 2025 — While electronic music innovators Ian Boddy and Harald Grosskopf have a shared legacy in influencing and propagating the musical style that has since become known as Berlin School, the two have never worked together on a musical project - until now. Boddy, a British artist who founded the eponymous electronic music label DiN over 25 years ago and who has released dozens of albums in his own right, and Grosskopf, a Berliner who played drums on several of Klaus Schulze's early albums including Moondawn and whose breakthrough album Synthesist firmly established him as a key artistic voice in the Berlin School movement, exchanged ideas at the E-Live festival in the Netherlands and the result was Doppelgänger. ​

While the duo was separated geographically during the writing and production of Doppelgänger, the album is strikingly cohesive and evocative in its composition, sonic textures, and rhythmic sequences. Boddy describes how the pair relied on sonic instinct to steer much of the project: "We’re musicians with all these years of experience, so quite often you don’t really have to have conversations - you kind of know what the other one is going to do and you just have to trust each other." Boddy's system consists of primarily analogue synths and components including a Roland System 100-M, a Buchla Easel Command, a VCS3, and an exquisitely curated Eurorack system - including two Chance Delay Eurorack modules - which he co-designed with AJH Synth.

AJH Synth Chance Delay: the beauty of randomisation
​While sequencing has long been sonic staple within Berlin School, the Chance Delay introduces a dynamic and fully controllable element of randomness into the mix, according to Boddy: "I designed the Chance Delay with AJH Synth because I wanted to randomise simple sequences so I can add and remove things in real time. This can make musical pieces so much more interesting." He says the module can be heard all over the album, including on "Signals from the Echo Chamber", a track which clocks in at nearly 10 minutes long. ​

While it is not an effects delay in the traditional sense, the Chance Delay uses triggers, chance and randomness to shape sequences and other input sources. Boddy explains how this can be heard on Doppelgänger: "If you listen to some of the sequences - especially at the start of tracks - some notes might be missing. Maybe it is an eight-note sequence, but only two notes are playing at any one time. And then maybe more notes are added to fill in the gaps as the song progresses," he explains. "This kind of module makes things so much more interesting, and I couldn’t find anyone that had ever designed that. So in my first designs with Allan [Hall, founder of AJH Synth], this module incorporated specific things involving this sort of randomisation."

Over the course of the project, the pair used Ableton Live as their primary digital audio workstation, which helped simplify workflow. Once tracks were completed, they were brought to Tobias Stock's OnTape studio in Dortmund for analogue processing and mixdown. "I would start to mix things here and we’d refine things until I had a working mix," Boddy explains. "Then I would send Harald all the stems and he went into Tobias’ studio and transferred everything to an analogue reel to reel. Then, everything would be remixed through an analogue desk to a stereo reel to reel. We made the final master from that. The analogue processing and tape give it a very muscular sound, especially in the bottom end of the recording."

Vintage analogue, reborn in modular
​Aside from the AJH Synth Chance Delay, Doppelgänger also features several other AJH Synth modules, including the Minimod Transistor Core VCO. "Allan’s oscillators sound great, even just raw," says Boddy. "I’ve got two of the MiniMod oscillators in my rack, as well as the MiniMod VCF ladder filter, the Sonic XV filter, the AJH Ring SM module, and various other things. They just have a quality of sound to them. Very often, people's modular systems end up being a big hodge podge of modules from a lot of manufacturers. But the more modules I get from AJH Synth, the more it feels like it works as a cohesive instrument, like they have been all thought out to work in a certain way. And they’ve got a lovely sound."

This May, Boddy will be performing concerts in The Netherlands as well as in Northern England. For specific dates and more information, visit his website at www.ianboddy.com.

To preview or purchase Doppelgänger, please visit the DiN Records Bandcamp page: https://dinrecords.bandcamp.com/. To learn more about the AJH Synth Chance Delay, please visit the AJH Synth product page at https://ajhsynth.com/ChanceDelay.html.

About AJH Synth
​AJH Synth is headed up by Allan J Hall, who has been involved with synths, electronics and music for several decades. He started by building a guitar fuzz box at the tender age of 12 and his interest in synthesisers and electronic music soon followed, fuelled by an unhealthy overexposure to early Tangerine Dream, Pink Floyd, Vangelis and Kitaro. For the last 15 years he has been building and modding synth systems both for himself and other electronic musicians, as well as spending some time as a semi-pro musician playing keyboards in several rock and tribute bands. Allan spent five years as a service technician repairing and modifying Moog, Arp, Korg, Roland and other analogue synthesisers along with some Pro Audio design work, previous to this he spent two years designing and building "boutique" valve (tube) guitar amplifiers. AJH Synth are based near Durham, in the northeast of England, where this small but enthusiastic bunch of synth heads now indulge their passion for all things modular.
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