Parov Stelar

Biography

Marcus Füreder’s first records came out on Bushido Recordings: the single “Synthetica / Stompin’ Ground” in 2000 under his own name, and a year later the album “Shadow Kingdom” as Plasma. The name Parov Stelar did not yet exist.

He was born on 27 November 1974 in Linz, in Upper Austria, and grew up there. He studied painting and graphic design in Linz and in Berlin. He started out playing in clubs as a DJ, under the pseudonym Plasma or his own name; his reference points were jazz, soul, house and electronic music. By his own account, he cannot read music and does not play any instrument. In 2003 Füreder founded the label Etage Noir Recordings in Linz, and he has released music on it as Parov Stelar ever since. The minimal techno he had begun with gave way fairly soon to other material. According to his story, he once came across a Billie Holiday record in his collection of old vinyl and it occurred to him to lay a minimal beat under it. How it really went is hard to check, but the story explains well where electro swing came from.

In 2004 came the EP “KissKiss”, followed by the album “Rough Cuts”; the Austrian radio station FM4 picked them up quickly. Roughly two years apart came “Seven and Storm” (2005) and “Shine” (2007), in which jazz, house and broken beat joined the electronics. Since November 2005 Füreder has performed as a DJ and also with a live band: some of the electronic parts are replaced by instruments, and the songs are rearranged for the stage. The line-up has changed from year to year, from four to eight musicians plus a singer; at various times the band has included the saxophonist Markus Ecklmayr (Max the Sax), the trumpeter Gerd Rahstorfer and the singer Elena Karafizi.

The breakthrough was the double album “Coco” (2009), which joins swing samples to dance electronics. It included the track “Catgroove”: in February 2010 the Canadian dancer Michael Startsev posted a YouTube video of himself dancing to it, and it has gathered more than fifty-five million views. The double album “The Princess” (2012) reached fourth place in the Austrian charts and went gold; it contained “All Night”. In 2017 the Italian telecom company TIM used that song in an advertising campaign, after which it entered the Italian top ten and was certified double platinum for more than one hundred thousand units sold.

The advertising stories were not always pleasant. In 2013 General Motors used “Booty Swing” in a commercial, but the track is built on lines from an American jazz song of 1938 whose vocabulary alludes to racial stereotypes about China. After the criticism, the company withdrew the commercial in May 2013.

After that Füreder deliberately moved away from repeating his own sound. “The Demon Diaries” (2015) reached number one on the Austrian album chart for the first time, and on “The Burning Spider” (2017) the blues came to the fore: he mixed his electronics with historical recordings by Lightnin’ Hopkins, Muddy Waters and Stuff Smith. It was his second number-one album in Austria. In 2019–2020 came the trilogy “Voodoo Sonic”, with hip-hop, soul and disco, and on 27 November 2020 it was brought together as a single album. Later came “Moonlight Love Affair” (2022) and, on 14 November 2025, “Artifact”: there is hardly any of the familiar blend of swing and dance electronics, but there are organ, choirs and an orchestra. The orchestral passages were recorded at the Brucknerhaus in Linz by an ensemble of 35 players conducted by Georg Wiesinger.

He has made reworkings of other artists’ songs: Lana Del Rey’s “Dark Paradise” and Bryan Ferry’s “Love Is the Drug” (both 2013), and a mix of “I Can’t Give You Anything but Love” for Tony Bennett and Lady Gaga (2014). In 2013 he also wrote the music for the Linz Klangwolke (an annual open-air sound-and-light spectacle) “Bruckner lebt!”, based on fragments of Anton Bruckner’s works, and for the eight-part series “Wo wir sind, ist oben” he wrote the music with Robert Matt.

Parov Stelar has played in Paris, London, New York and Moscow, and at festivals including Coachella (2016), Glastonbury, Sziget and Lollapalooza. His headline concerts in Australia took place in February 2020. He has won ten Amadeus Austrian Music Awards (the first in 2012; “The Princess” was named album of the year in 2013), and in 2019 he was given the Music Moves Europe Talent Award.

He showed his paintings to the public in the summer of 2021 in Linz: the Francisco Carolinum museum presented 25 large-format works, among them “HELLO Mom”, “I’ll be OK soon” and “Toxic Lover”. Text plays the same role in them as in his music. Then came the solo exhibition “danke, gut” at Galerie Schloss Parz (2022), participation in the “Music Lounge” series at the Technisches Museum Vienna (2023), and in 2024 the exhibitions “blind date” in Linz and “second date” in Salzburg, and a presentation at Salon Bucherer in Vienna.

On 16 May 2026 Füreder performed in Vienna as an interval act in the Eurovision Song Contest final and played “Black Lilies”.