Representative Albums: "My Melody," "Total Pop," "Party Anticonformista"
Representative Songs: "Movie Star," "Holiday Inn," "Comme un Garcon"
Biography
Though they're based in Berlin, the witty pop group Stereo Total draw bandmembers and musical influences from across Europe. Vocalist/guitarist/drummer Françoise Cactus is French and vocalist/guitarist/keyboardist Brezel Göring is German, and the group has included members from Italy, Scotland, and Bohemia. Their 1995 debut album, Oh Ah!, on Bungalow Records introduced their kitchen-sink approach to pop music, which embraces punk, hip-hop, disco, '60s pop, and rock from France, the U.K., and the U.S., as well as electro and new wave elements. Further Bungalow releases like Monokini and Juke-Box Alarm followed; in 1998, they made their U.S. debut with their self-titled album on Bobsled Records. My Melody followed in 1999. Musique Automatique appeared on Bobsled in late 2001, but was reissued -- along with Oh Ah! and Monokini -- by Kill Rock Stars over the next two years. Stereo Total returned with their sixth full-length, Do the Bambi, in 2005. Kill Rock Stars' reissue campaign continued in 2006 with new editions of Juke-Box Alarm and My Melody, while Disko B released the Bambi remix album Discotheque. For 2007's full-length Paris-Berlin, Stereo Total returned to the rawer sound of their earlier work. ~ Heather Phares, All Music Guide
Stereo Total is a Berlin-based multilingual, French-German duo comprising Françoise Cactus (born Françoise Van Hove and formerly co-leader of the band Les Lolitas) and Brezel ('pretzel') Göring (aka Friedrich von Finsterwalde, born Friedrich Ziegler).
Their music, which can be described as a humorous mix of synth-pop, new wave, electronica, punk rock and pop music, tends to embody a retro-hip European 1960s mod style, with references to that period evident in their music. Some songs evoke a mod/psych/garage-rock vibe, both in production aesthetic and lyrical content, along with 1960s French-pop, in the vein of Francoise Hardy. Some of their tracks are playful, low-fi versions of pop, rock and soul songs that employ the use of analogue recording equipment and reverberation. In that vein, they made a pop version of Salt-N-Pepa's electro rap hit "Push It".
"I Love You, Ono",—a re-titled cover version of "I Love You, Oh No!" by Japanese new wave band, The Plastics—from their album My Melody, was used by Sony in a European commercial for the Handycam in June 2005, and was also featured in Robot Food's snowboarding hit "Afterbang". In 2009, the song was used in a Dell commercial for the Studio 15. The title of the Stereo Total version is a play on both the original Plastics title and Yoko Ono, and is a likely homage to the original's Japanese origin.
Another one of their songs, "L'Amour a trois" (the French version of the song "Liebe zu Dritt"), was used in a commercial for 3G-phones in Sweden in the fall of 2005 by the company 3, as well as by the SpanishTV Channel Cuatro in an advert for the company and in the disco scene in the independent Argentinian film "Glue". Their song "Cannibale" was included in the console game Dance Dance Revolution ULTRAMIX 4, released in November 2006.
