Beaifully Designed 3LP Album + MP3 Downloadcode

"Reinvented" 21 year old Norwegian techno classic by Mental Overdrive gets the expanded and remastered treatment on Full Pupp's "techno not techno"offshoot Rett I Fletta!

Tracklist 3LP: A1. Spoing, A2. Disto Disco, B. Higher, C1. Please Hold On, C2. Child, D1. Motorcity (Alt Mix), D2. Phunkee, E. Moves, F. Jaz

Per Martinsen aka Mental Overdrive and "Plugged", two elementary techno Classics from Norway.

Per Martinsen was born in the Arctic town of Tromsø in Northern Norway in 1966, and spent his teens listening to imported records and tapes filled with electronic (and some non-electronic) music stemming mainly from the UK and Germany. He first entered the world of music-making by playing drums in local post-punk outfits, but moved on to electronic instruments when he bought his own Roland TR-808 drum machine in 1983.

Setting out on a mission to connect to the sources of his inspiration, he ended up in London in 1987, where he spent his days squatting in Hackney and working as an assistant programmer in This Heat's seminal Cold Storage studio in Brixton.

Hit by the wave of Chicago house and Detroit techno invading London at the time, he soon found himself experimenting with making beats inspired by these new sounds merged with the 80's sounds he was accustomed to from his pre-London era, like industrial music and EBM.

A cassette tape with some of these beats was given to a close friend, who at the time was signed to Belgium's Crammed Discs, and this earned him an invitation to fly over for a series of studio sessions in Brussels courtesy of the label. The sessions led to several 12" singles being released by Crammed in 1988.

Most notable of these was his collaboration with Minimal Compact's Samy Birnbach (aka DJ Morpheus), with the release of the single "Hallucination Generation" under the moniker "The Gruesome Twosome" in 1989. The single was licensed by Crammed to Nettwerk Records in the US, and peaked at number 9 on Billboard's dance chart in the company of the likes of Madonna, Janet Jackson and Depeche Mode.

Freaked out by the notion of being sucked into the capitalist machine of the big music industry that usually followed chart success, Per ran away from Brussels and went clubbing at Gent's Boccaccio club instead. Here he met Renaat Vandepapeliere of R&S Records, and soon found himself doing sessions with David Morley and Joey Beltram at the R&S headquarters, resulting in the release of his first EP under the Mental Overdrive moniker in 1990.

A series of EP's for R&S followed, and after relocating to Norway after some time, the debut album "Plugged" was released on his own label Love OD Communications in 1995. The album moved on from the more industrial-inspired techno bangers of the early EP's, and showed a more mellow side of Per as an artist and producer. More laid back, but not content with leaving the sounds of his machines unprocessed and without a personal signature, he commissioned two students at Trondheim's technical university to construct the "Distortotron", which is believed to be the world's first "bit crusher". The effect was used throughout the album, and led the mastering engineer to return the DAT-tape at first listen with the note: "Please send new master copy. This one is fucked."


Cue summer 2014:
Daniel Blackbelt Andersen brought his shabby copy of "Plugged" along to one of the regular Full Pupp shindigs and played Prins Thomas a couple of the slightly more "ambient" tracks off the album stating it would be a dream come true to remix all of these tracks and that he'd spoken to Per about getting hold of the stems, if any.
A borrowed copy and a phone call to Per later we not only get the thumbs up to go ahead with the plan of reissueing the whole album and throw in a couple of new remixes but he goes through his archives and finds the original Akai S 3000 formatted floppy disks, all the premasters on DAT AND last but not least all the alternative takes and unreleased tracks that did not make it to the finished album.

A note from Thomas:

Being relatively new on the "Oslo"scene back in 1995 I missed out on "Plugged"the first time around even though knowing your Per was mandatory, being the grand old man of the norwegian techno scene and all.
I later got to know Per but his catalogue was already too big to get the full overview of his artistic past.
I've been working on and off with Per on a few releases for Full Pupp through the years and we had already started talking about some sort of reissue-project when Blackbelt dumped this record and already half formed idea in my lap.
Originally released as a 2xLP in a plastic sleeve and the fact that quite a few of the tracks either had peculiar fade-ins, odd countdowns and dj-unfriendly format I thought there's enough reasons to do a new cut already there.
Then while going through the piles of unreleased tracks and unused takes I felt there was an even better record hidden in there. This time around I found material justifying an expanded 3 disc version and there's still some bits left which hopefully sees the light of day at some point. The sleeve has been lovingly redesigned to match this "expanded"edition by our dear Eirik Seu Stokkmo at Metric Design so a good couple of reasons to grab this new version if you're the lucky owner of the original record.

Says Peer: "So, after digging out my old DAT-player, my old Akai S3000, my old floppy archive and DAT-tape collection, I sent everything off to Thomas,and after some time he sent me back his edits and selections of alternative mixes, and then the new remixes. I guess for me the main thing now is to try to hear the material with "new ears", and enjoy the distance in time from when I originally made the tracks. But I also enjoy hearing the slightly different angle that Thomas and Daniel have brought out in the alternative selections, edits, remixes and new mastering, and now I can't wait to have the vinyl edition to play out and blend into contemporary selections of music to hear how it all fits in."

We hope this record sounds as fresh to your ears as ours, 21 years after it's initial release. And if this whole thing wets your appetite then
do look forward to spanking new material from Per on Rett I Fletta later this year

PS:RIF007LP/CD will be closely followed by the RIF008 12" which besides containing 2 remixes from Blackbelt Andersen of tracks from "Plugged"will
also include a previously unreleased version of "Disto Disco" and a Prins Thomas "reconstruction"of the faulty audio experiment "Yeeh".
Bånn apetitt as we say

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