My full name is Per Asbjørn Martinsen, and I was born and raised in the Arctic town of Tromsø, Northern Norway.

I’ve had a profound interest in music from an early age, and the first record I bought with my own money was the album THE SLIDER by T.REX, released in 1972. I was then six years old.

In my early teens, which coincided with the post-punk era, I bough a drum-kit and started playing in a band with a couple of good friends. Our band PEDER XEM played our first gig when Tromsø’s youth occupied the old police-station in town, in protest to the city’s ignorance in creating opportunities for young people.

Other than playing and listening to music, my other favourite pastime when I was a kid, was to disassemble all the electronic devices I could find lying around the house, in order to see how they worked (prior to me disassembling them).

So when I eventually heard the album MAN MACHINE by KRAFTWERK at the age of eleven, my interest in music and electronics melted together in a holy unity that became the backbone of my future life.

As my aspirations as a drummer gradually shifted to try and play like the dum machines on the records I liked, this eventually led to the purchase of a Roland TR-808 drum machine, which, in combination with borrowed monophonic synthesizers, guided me step by step away from the band situation and into experimenting with purely electronic instruments.

So, rigged with a small arsenal of electronic devices, including a KORG MS-20, a ROLAND SPACE ECHO, a CASSETTE TAPE DECK and the aforementioned TR-808, me and my friends locked ourselves up in our bedrooms, and tried to make some new noise that we could impress each other with.

Eventually, me and me and my friend GEIR JENSSEN (later of BEL CANTO and BIOSPHERE fame) discovered that we could almost resemble a poor-man’s CABARET VOLTAIRE by using the rewind-button on the tape-deck to resemble a sampler – back then a digital wet dream that was far out of our financial reach.

When our bedroom noodlings came to an end due to a mix of boredom, youthful ambition and stupidity, it led me to sell all my gear at buy an open train ticket and set sail (or rail) for “The World”.

“The World” turned out to be the squatting district of Hackney, East London, where I ended up purely by chance. I had no idea where I was heading, but bumped into some nice people in Amsterdam who said “if you ever come to London, come and visit”.

I ended up staying for a couple of years (don’t ever invite me around your house if you don’t mean it).

The winter of 1987/88 saw CHICAGO ACID HOUSE and DETROIT TECHNO invading the UK through mixtapes and import vinyl records, and for someone who had made tons of beats, but no “real songs”, this musical inspiration, combined with the new arena of electronic dance music that the illegal rave scene presented, was too inviting to stay away from.

I had finally bought myself a sampler, an E-MU EMAX, sequenced by an ATARI ST1040 computer, and through a chance meeting with MIXMASTER MORRIS at the SOHO SOUNDHOUSE (we saw each other stealing their sound libraries by copying them down to floppy discs – never underestimate criminal bonding), I was introduced to the manager of COLD STORAGE STUDIOS in Brixton.

A deal was made that if I let his clients use my sampler and computer in the daytime, I could use the studio at night. A no-brainer arrangement, even if I hadn’t calculated stuff like food and sleep into it.

The access to a 24-track professional studio was exploited to the max, and by sitting in as a tape-op (google it) on sessions by artist like HOLGER HILLER and remixes of LAIBACH, as well as numerous sessions by various dub and reggae ensembles, I eventually managed to record some of my ideas down to tape.

One of these recordings made their way through my aforementioned friend NILS JOHANSEN to the head of the label CRAMMED DISCS in Brussels, and by invitation I flew over to Brussels to do some sessions at DAYLIGHT STUDIOS.

The sessions resulted in a string of releases on their newly opened dance label SSR RECORDS, and the demo became my first solo release DRUM, released under the pseudonym SYAMESE.

I ended up staying for a year or so (I told you – THINK BEFORE YOU INVITE ME ANYWHERE!), and also met SAMY BIRNBACH of MINIMAL COMPACT fame and his fantastic record collection. A mutual date with an AKAI S1000 sampler, followed by endless solitary nights of tape editing by myself, led to the single HALLUCINATION GENERATION, released under the name THE GRUESOME TWOSOME, and for the first (and only) time, I saw my own music in the BILLBOARD TOP 10 Dance Charts.

But my feet shouted for a gun to hit them, and I was not remotely interested in following up on the success we had, to the label’s frustration (and possibly the very hidden and pain-soaked parts of my own financially oriented brain).

I had already started checking out the clubs around Belgium, and a hitchhike with a bunch of spectacularly stoned French guys took me to legendary NEW BEAT club BOCCACHIO in Ghent.

Hanging out by the DJ-booth, I started chatting with an impressively energetic man who also found it the best spot in the club to be situated. He introduced himself as RENAAT DE VANDEPAPELIERE, who, together with his wife SABINE MAES ran a label called R&S RECORDS, and invited me (silly man) to come up to their studio and do some sessions.

A year or so later (told you), I had done sessions with people like CEEJAY BOLLAND, JOEY BELTRAM, MARCOS SALON and DAVID MORLEY, and accumulated enough tracks of my own to finally release the 12000AD EP under the name MENTAL OVERDRIVE.

The project name spontaneously came out of my mouth as Renaat was driving at 250 km/h towards the cutting room and impatiently prompted me to come up with a name before we shortly arrived, but has somehow stuck with me ever since.

One of me.

In the years that followed, I gradually relocated to Oslo, where a slowly emerging rave scene now started to create the usual shocking headlines, and a bunch of my old friends had moved. I was invited to play at some of the early illegal parties, but also hooked up with PEER OSMUNDSVAAG, who had boldly opened the city’s first legal (really?) club playing house and techno – CONFUSION.

I started loosely oscillating between my new hometown, studio sessions in Belgium and visits back to London, while also taking my MENTAL OVERDRIVE live sets out on the road in the UK and Europe, playing at raves like Berlin’s first MAYDAY party in 1991.

This went on for a few years, but as I grew tired of the purely dancefloor-oriented music I was involved with, I started exploring new sounds in my studio (things change, man). As my new material didn’t resonate with what R&S was doing by the time, I decided to set up my own label to release my debut album PLUGGED in 1995.

Thus Love OD Communications was born (I can’t recall if I was full of love at the time or just had too much of it), and a new outlet for myself and myself had been opened.

A Norwegian reviewer who didn’t particularly like electronic music, rather sarcastically suggested it would be interesting to hear how it had sounded in an “unplugged” version – the craze of the time for “real” artists, so I produced and released a silent version of the album called UNPLUGGED in order to make him happy (we actually mastered the silence twice to get it right).

This gesture to yet again prove my financial geniality led to many an angry customer returning their purchases, but I somehow felt I had proved a point. Music has always been about communication, no? I have always believed in trying out ways of making statements through something as simple as record releases, something that also culminated in trying to sell a single CD in one single copy on eBay (in 2007 – eight years before WU TANG CLAN actually succeeded in doing the same)

In parallel to the release of my own material in various more or less successful ways, I had now also been introduced to the very talented and lovable NICHOLAS SILLITOE, who had, like many a brit, been lured to these shores by the song of a Norse siren, combined with a curiosity for the music scene happening in Oslo.

We immediately clicked on our musical vision and bad sense of humour, and in the years that followed we produced and released a string of material under the name ILLUMINATION as well as a series of remixes under the name CHILLUMINATI.

On the back of the relative success of our releases we also toured as a DJ-duo around the world, partly as ambassadors for the compilation series CAFE DEL MAR due to many of our tracks and remixes being featured on the compilations.

This brought us to play rather high-end and posh clubs that to our surprise let us through their doors in spite of signs stating “no dogs allowed” at their entrances.

Luckily we could also play regularly at our local Oslo dens SKANSEN and JAZID and through that still connect to our core crowd and the booming and interesting scene that our home city represented in the late nineties/early noughties.

Around that same time, I was also introduced to AGGIE PETERSON – a very talented singer, songwriter and producer that I by some miraculous reason still haven’t been outroduced to, and to this day share my family life and the responsibility to two wonderful kids with.

Together, we have written and produced three albums together, released under the moniker FROST, and also toured extensively throughout Norway, Europe and the UK from the early noughties onwards.

In 2008, after relocating to my hometown Tromsø, I started exploring writing as part of my musical journey. The result was “transmedia” (it was a word back then) project EARTHBOUND – SURFING THE APOCALYPSE, a story heavily influenced by reading about the “2012” Mayan prophecies, mixed with a fascination for the conspiratorial way of thinking that dominated many online channels at the time.

I connected a series of art installations on the fictional universe of the storytelling, made a lot of fake Twitter and Facebook profiles for the characters involved, and made a series of spoof musical artists to support the musical tastes of the main character, who also was a (very minimalistic) blogger. The result of whichcan be heard on the compilation EARTHBOUND – SURFING THE APOCALYPSE – A VIRTUAL SOUNDTRACK.

After that, my focus mainly turned back to produce more releases and play live with my MENTAL OVERDRIVE project again, and I released a string of albums and singles on various labels over the next decade, while doing the odd remix inbetween.

In 2019, I applied for, and got a position as a research fellow in Artistic Research at UiT – The Arctic University of Norway, which came as a surprise, as I didn’t have the formal education to enter an institution at an academic PhD-level, but was considered on the background of my artistic practise.

In my project THE SEARCH FOR RESONANCE, I wanted to explore “the correspondences between geometry and frequency” and concentrate on “the physicality of sound”.

Little did I know that after three years, my project had instead morphed into investigating artistic identity and social resonance, and the way these factors can shape our creative processes. But hey, maybe that’s the strength of artistic research? What do I know?

In any way, the project left with three slightly different artistic identities, as expressed through my musical projects WAVE∞FORM, N∆EON TE∆RDROPS and the ever morphing MENTAL OVERDRIVE, and I’m continuing to write the back stories of these identities as we speak.

So if you’ve read this far, you now got the true story. Why don’t you head over to PYRAMIDS ON THE MOON and read all the lies – or – if you like what I do, and want to help fund further works and get early access to all my musical output and other works, you can subscribe to my Patreon page and make me very happy!