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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[txt from ]