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Format: CD / LP
DB147 | Indigo 90124-1

Tracklisting:
01.Miss Rebellion des Hormone
02. Ich bin der Stricherjunge
03. Plastic
04. Komplex mit dem Sex
05.: Lolita Fantome
06. Küsse aus der Hölle der Musik
07. Plus minus null
08. Mehr Licht
09. Ta voix au telephone
10. Patty Hearst

Paris-Berlin is both – a Rock’n’Roll- and a Chanson-Album. At the same time it’s more dynamic as well as more romantic than Stereo Total’s previous productions. On the CD-cover you can see Brezel Göring and Françoise Cactus shown as naked lovers. The  recordings sound very naturally and pretty ’rough’. There are no superfluous sound effects, resulting in a production evoking intimacy und warmth.
The songs are for the most part very melodic, the lyrics deal with topics like LOVE, REBELLION and NOSTALGIA.

The way from the Primitive to the Complex to the finally Simple
Why the hack do Stereo Total not only write songs like ’Liebe zu dritt’? Why don’t they just sign a deal with a major record company (stuffing them in an appropriate box, doing the usual kind of marketing and promotion)? Why don’t they play big stadiums and care about chart rankings?
”We could do that, but…“ (what follows now is ear-deafening noise from the ’Prolog’ of Einstürzende Neubauten).

Instead of all that they once more return to their roots, to Lo-Fi, 4-track recording, guitar – drums – and monophonic-synthesizer-minimalism, to their beloved ’give a shit’-attitude, humour, to subversion, to the specific Françoise-Cactus-definition of feminism and to pop music everyone and everywhere around the world understands immediately (stylistic and linguistic borders don’t exist anymore) and knows, that this kind of music does NOT have anything to do (anything) with terms like maximization of  profit(s), music industry, music television (MTV), mobile ringtones and exploitation.

Like Horses on cheap drugs
Stereo Total have constantly been on tour all around the world for the last six years: North and South America, Japan, Russia, Europe, China, Turkey.
The new record represents the concerts in a good way: minimalist electro-chansons right between Punkrock, Rock’n’Roll, Disco and New Wave, played on guitar, drums and Sampler, played by two people sounding like a hord of horses on cheap drugs. Although best-known as „Electro-Duo“ Stereo Total always used drums and guitar on stage, a rarity in most clubs the past years (where „live-set“ mainly meant CD-Playback), but Stereo Total have always played both: the clubs and the rock venues (where on the other hand apart from them – almost nobody performed with sampler and synthesizer).

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Format: 10″
DB135 | Indigo 87813-6

SINGLE:

“Das erste Mal” Dub Trip 1+2

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Format:CD
DB131 | 85685-2

Tracklisting:

Finally! Three years after the world success of “Musique Automatique” (on Labels/EMI and Kill Rock Stars in the US) the berlin duo STEREO TOTAL are back. Let’s shortly quote the list of references for their first five albums that also influence this sixth album which celebrates their 10th birthday : «40{52683dc5cfbdd8b3430c87738b6fd8a1b6d250070828804dc6c6f79ba8206849} Chanson, 20{52683dc5cfbdd8b3430c87738b6fd8a1b6d250070828804dc6c6f79ba8206849} R’n’R, 10{52683dc5cfbdd8b3430c87738b6fd8a1b6d250070828804dc6c6f79ba8206849} Punkrock, 3{52683dc5cfbdd8b3430c87738b6fd8a1b6d250070828804dc6c6f79ba8206849} DAF-Sequenzer, 4{52683dc5cfbdd8b3430c87738b6fd8a1b6d250070828804dc6c6f79ba8206849} Jacques Dutronc-Rhythmique, 7{52683dc5cfbdd8b3430c87738b6fd8a1b6d250070828804dc6c6f79ba8206849} Brigitte Bardot and Serge Gainsbourg, 1,5{52683dc5cfbdd8b3430c87738b6fd8a1b6d250070828804dc6c6f79ba8206849} Cosmonaute, 10{52683dc5cfbdd8b3430c87738b6fd8a1b6d250070828804dc6c6f79ba8206849} really old synthesizers, 10{52683dc5cfbdd8b3430c87738b6fd8a1b6d250070828804dc6c6f79ba8206849} 8-bit Amiga-sampling, 10{52683dc5cfbdd8b3430c87738b6fd8a1b6d250070828804dc6c6f79ba8206849} transistor amplifier, 1{52683dc5cfbdd8b3430c87738b6fd8a1b6d250070828804dc6c6f79ba8206849} really expensive and advanced instruments» … «Yéyétronic, electropunky, kitsch & speed, sissilistening, bricolopop, Berliner juke-box»…«a minimalistic production (in a positive sense), meaning a home-made-trash-garage-sound crossed with underground, authentic as well as amateurish, ironic as well as effective, pop as well as … political.»
And in addition children (and the punks and the young fashion victims and the male and female dreamers of each kind and from each country) love this music.

It has taken STERO TOTAL a while this time, but finally here is “Do The Bambi” and a whole lot to hear with 19 new tracks. STEREO TOTAL is still this french-german Garage-Rockabilly Electronic/Non-Electronic duo consisting of Françoise Cactus and Brezel Göring.
We know about Brezel that he never sleeps, takes no drugs, neither drinks coffee nor alcohol and got two illegitimate children. He prides himself to have a truck driver’s taste in women. That is not true however because his girlfriend is Françoise Cactus, novelist, artist, who wrote 23 books and is a highly paid feature writer. She comes from the “Girl Garage” and “Psychedelic”-Era of the 80ies, he is considered to be “experimental”.
Where was the album recorded? In the rehearsal space and in the bedroom. The two have recorded everything on their own: to ask people for advice is in general pretty unnecessary. They nevertheless followed the wise instructions of their producer Cem Oral (which we know from Air Liquide): “Don’t give up before you are finished!” The result is Homerecording-Folk in a highly dematrialized world but (quoting Brezel Göring): “ We want to have at least as much technology, that we can hate technology”.
So what are the results? “Artificial Girls Music”?, romanticism, anarchy, happiness and mourning. Intimate, intense, amusing, agitating, furious, explosive.

STERO TOTAL – caught in a vicious circle of maximum speed and “J’aime les grandes émotions” – which leads again to even more speed and emotions.
So what is special about this album? Judging the record by its cover it is a mixture of kitsch and being fucked up. A lot of the record is about film-history and the longing for love

“Do The Bambi” means something like “Show the beautiful eyes beneath your long lashes and rescue me from the inferno of my ego in this sad and mean world!”

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Format:pic-Disc
DB153pic-Disc | Indigo 94509-1

Tracklisting:

01. Hallo Damenklo
02. Alaska
03. Divines Handtascha
04. Andy Warhol
05. Barbe a Papa
06. No Controles
07. Du Bist Gut Zu Vogeln
08. I Wanna Be A Mama
09. Babyboom (Ohne Mich)
10. Lady Dandy
11. Illegal
12. Wenn Ich Ein Junge War
13. Tour De France
14. Larmes De Metal
15. Elles Te Bottent, Mes Bottes
16. Baby Ouh!
17. Radio Song

Baby Ouh!, the 10th album from the long-running Franco-German duo of Françoise Cactus and Brezel Göring, is a polyglot wink at trash pop history, effervescently filthy-mouthed and off-handedly intelligent. Songs start in one language, notch a few pop culture references, then insouciantly switch to another. There’s a bouncy decadence in even the slightest of these tracks, a gleeful whirl to the bottom sound tracked by super-sugary disco. You might catch a whiff of Abba in the crack house, or Donna Summer waking up in the gutter, neither a terrible thing in itself. And yet, you can’t help but feel that Stereo Total is dancing a little too fast, cracking a little too wise. When mid-way through 2010, you still look to Divine and Andy Warhol for iconic style, you’re not retro anymore, you’re just passé.

Thus while previous Stereo Total discs charmed with their deadpan cool, this one has a manic quality to it, as if relevance had to be proved, track by track, chorus by chorus. It starts with the very unsettling “Hello Ladies,” told in Cactus’ voice, from the perspective of an aging ladies room attendant. Caustic asides like, “I give make-up advice that they know already / They don’t give a shit about my long life,” are obviously about all kinds of things: the shallowness of the party culture, the corrosive effect of income inequality, age-ism, etc. But the song might just also be about being a pop singer in a culture that moves with lightning speed, forgetting about bands far more recently born than Stereo Total, and leaving hardly a bubble in its wake. (Today’s empty icon, Lady Gaga, gets a nod later on, in the dreamily melancholy “Lady Dandy.”)

It’s Göring who scores the sharpest points on this disc, with his sort-of tribute to Almodovar’s Bad Education in the song “I Wanna Be a Mamma.” The lyrics veer into dysfunction almost immediately, as Göring daydreams about cross-dressing a son and naming him Lucifer, yet the music bubbles on in a happy, cluelessly buoyant melody. It makes you wonder, if you don’t speak French or German, what the hell these two go on about during the rest of the album.

The covers on Baby Ouh! showcase a playful, irreverent expertise that covers many different styles of pop. There’s a panting, electro-bop version of Kraftwerk’s “Tour de France,” a disco-trash romp through Brigitte Fontaine’s “La Barbe A Papa,” and a tongue-in-cheek gender-play on “Wenn Ich Ein Junge Wär,” (“If I Were a Boy”) from 1950s pop star Rita Pavone (via Nina Hagen). But none of these are as simultaneously clever and silly, daring and frivolous, as Cactus and Göring on their own account, enumerating the contents of Divine’s handbag (“Divine”) or crying metal tears (“Larmes De Métal”).

It would all be quite enjoyable if you didn’t have the sense that they were trying too hard, and, in frantically reconfiguring the most transient of pop kitsch, had somehow become their own raw material.

By Jennifer Kelly