Stereo Total

With a career encompassing three decades of music, the French-German duo Stereo Total cultivated a global audience with their multi-lingual, kitschy melange of styles, ranging from punk to hip-hop, disco, 60s French pop, electronica, and everything in between. Formed in 1993 in Berlin by multi-instrumentalists Françoise “Cactus” Van Hove and Friedrich “Brezel Göring” Ziegler, the duo’s fiercely DIY M.O. was heavily based on the use of cheap gear and extensive crate digging at flea markets. They soon found themselves at the center of Berlin’s Easy Listening scene and quickly landed a record deal with Bungalow Records. Oh Ah!, their official debut for the label arrived in 1995 and was followed by 1997’s Monokini. In 1998, they released Juke-Box Alarm and an eponymous compilation, which introduced them to American audiences and prompted a world tour throughout the US, Europe, and Japan. A fourth album titled My Melody saw the light in 1999 and included a cover of “I Love You, Oh No!” by The Plastics (wittily renamed as “I Love You, Ono”) that would be later used in a Dell ad. Stereo Total continued to push the boundaries of pop music with Musique Automatique (2001), Do the Bambi (2005), and Paris-Berlin (2007) before closing the decade with 2010’s Baby Ouh! In subsequent years the pair pivoted to film music, writing the soundtrack for Shinji Imaoka’s Underwater Love (2011), and dropped Cactus vs Brezel (2012), recorded with producer Gus Seyffert. Following the release of compilation Yéyé Existentialiste in 2015, Stereo Total returned with the self-produced Les Hormones (2016) and issued Ah ! Quel Cinéma ! in 2019 before Françoise Cactus’ untimely death of a breast cancer on February 17, 2021.