Love OD Communications

In 1996, the Tromsø International Film Festival (TIFF) commissioned Mental Overdrive and Biosphere to compose an original soundtrack for the Russian silent movie ‘Man with a Movie Camera’ by director Dziga Vertov. The duo split the work between them by selecting alternating scenes throughout the film, in order to make the 1 hour and 8 minute soundtrack as varied as possible. The first screening with this new soundtrack performed live took place in Tromsø in January 1996, and then a series of concerts/screenings followed at selected festivals in Norway and France. Biosphere released his pieces of the soundtrack as part the 2001 version of his ‘Substrata’ album, but the Mental Overdrive body of work has not yet been available – until now.

In 2009, the Tromso International Film Festival (TIFF) commissioned Karelian electronic artist and composer Sergey Soukas and Norwegians Aggie Peterson and Per Martinsen (of Frost and Mental Overdrive) to create a new soundtrack for Russian filmmaker Vsevolod Pudopvkin’s 1926 classic silent movie ‘Mother’. The soundtrack was first performed live with the film at TIFF in January 2009, before embarking on a tour in Russia in September the same year. Then, in November, a screening with live music was successfully transmitted from a Tromso movie theatre during the Insomnia Festival 2009 and viewed in real time at the Beijing NO+CH Festival using a brand new bit-torrent streaming technique (a world first experiment, actually). Now, a studio recording of the soundtrack has been made and is going to be available as a digital release in stereo through Love OD Communications, and in both stereo and 5:1 surround format on DVD via mailorder.

Charlotte Bendiks grew up in Tromsø, Northern Norway – often viewed as the ‘techno capital’ of Norway due to a long list of electronic artist emerging from such a small Arctic town. Charlotte got interested in electronic music at a young age, and started DJing in her early twenties. Over the years she has become one of the key players on the new Tromsø scene with DJ-sets focusing on sexy side of dance and body music. Although her main genre is classical house music, her selection will range from disco to african groove and latin beats, and she always aims to create a euphoric, hot and sweaty atmosphere on the dancefloor in true Arctic style (i.e. the colder it gets outside, the closer yo have to stick together in order to keep warm). Intergrating live vocals and percussion has become her trademark of late, and live collaborations with drummers and other musicians has helped her transform her performances from traditional DJ-sets into something inbetween a band and DJ performance. Charlotte has also used her spare time organizing underground house parties under the name “Moist” (possibly a subconscious nod to the legendary Detroit parties of the same name), and has played an intergral part in Tromsø’s Insomnia Festival, taking care of bookings from 2006 to present. In 2011 Charlotte started focusing on her own music production, and has since done collaborations with Cologne based artist Lena Willikens, the boys from Coma as well as Mexican Comeme hot shot Daniel Maloso. When she’s not playing, working or crate digging, her favourite activity is chilling naked in a jacuzzi with a glass of Möet in each hand. Love OD is now proud to present her debut EP ‘Afterhours’, including the Willikens/Maloso collab ‘Too hot to handle’, remix services from Carisma DJ’s AKA Carolina Stegmayer and Ismael Pinkler, whereby the latter has also contributed his mastering touches to the EP.

Mental Overdrive – ‘CYCLS’

December 21st 2012 will see the release of the sixth Mental Overdrive album, ‘CYCLS’.

That is, it will be the sixth album only if you don’t count in the ‘silent’ album ‘Unplugged’, the two EP compilations ‘The Phuture that never happened’ and ‘Everything is connected’, or the ‘live-performance only’ album ‘ANTI-LBM’.

If you do, ‘CYCLS’ shall rather be the tenth Mental Overdrive album.

This is just to show that most numbers are relative to any given truth, depending on your personal perspective.

But in any way, if you’re a follower of mythology in the digital age, you might already have noticed that the release date of ‘CYCLS’ coincides with the much hyped ‘end-date’ of the Mayan Calendar.

This is of course intentional, and to emphasise it even further, all ten tracks of the new album will be released in a weekly ‘count-down’ fashion prior to the full release – much like a kind of ‘musical advent calendar’ for the Mayan end-date.

This means that every Friday from October 19th onwards, a new track off the album will be made available through mentaloverdrive.bandcamp.com

The full album will then be released through Love OD Communications on the last of the ten Fridays, and become available via all traditional outlets for digital music.

The tracklist reads as follows:

1. A fireball, it is red, the sky looks black about it
2. Trollhunter
3. Sunstorm
4. Damascus
5. Quarks
6. Dada Urka
7. Kollaps
8. Systems
9. Liverpool Street
10. Beaches

For info and updates, check in on facebook.com/mentaloverdrive or follow @mentaloverdrive on Twitter

The exhibition and label night in Cologne was a blast, and we have now moved on to re-charge for upcoming events in the autumn. In the meantime you can check out more of the great pics of the ‘Elsewhere’ installation shot by Peyman Azhari (see sample above). You can also listen to Bill Drummond reading from ‘Earthbound – Surfing the Apocalypse’ in the two clips below, and then click on the link to get the Kindle edition of the book for your holiday read. Have a lovely summer!

We’re happy to announce that we will be presenting our own label night in Cologne as part of C/O Pop 2012. The event will be taking place at Zum Scheuen Reh on Thursday June 21st, and the line-up for the night is Boska (live), Mental Overdrive (live) and DJ Charlotte Bendiks (pictured). More info coming up here shortly.

Boska’s collaboration with Nguzu during last year’s Red Bull Music Academy is now available as a free download as part of the “Not for sale” compilation. We’re all too excited about this and the upcoming EP on Love OD. Click here to get the free track.