Girl Talk: Master of the Mashup

Dec. 6, 2010, 5:15 PM EST


Renegade DJ Gregg Gillis splices hits into full-length mixes and live raves



By Phil Freeman

Special to MSN Music



Gregg Gillis, who performs under the name Girl Talk, has taken the early-2000s "mashup" fad and turned it into a surprisingly viable career. The concept seems simple: Match the vocals from one song to the instrumental backing track from another. But on five full-length mixes released beginning in 2002, Gillis' combinations are extremely unorthodox and pull from the full range of pop from the '70s to the 2000s, with no regard for genre boundaries or indie cred. His latest album, "All Day," lays the vocal from Rihanna's "Rude Boy" over the iconic bass line from Fugazi's "Waiting Room."



Bing: Gregg Gillis, aka Girl Talk



Gillis clearly isn't in it for the money: His albums are released for free (or pay-what-you-want) download on the Illegal Art label/website. This is probably what keeps him from being sued out of existence by the RIAA, and allows him to keep up a ferocious touring schedule. His live shows are sweaty marathons of unexpected juxtapositions that bring a goofy grin to the listener's face even as they make the urge to dance impossible to resist.



MSN Music: What software do you use? Is it the same software you've been using all along?



Gregg Gillis: I fiddle around with a bunch of things, but the main pieces of software have basically been the same since around 2001-2002 for me. I use Adobe Audition, a common sound editor that you can find just about anywhere. That's what I use to do the sampling and isolating of tracks, and then I use a program called AudioMulch to perform live. It allows me to have a few different loops and then try out things, basically layered on top of each other.



How do you sequence your albums? Do you compose each combination of songs and then figure out which one goes next to another, or is there some larger pattern visible to you from the beginning?



Oftentimes it starts with a combination of two different songs that I think go together, whether that's a beat and a vocal or a melody and just a drum or whatever -- something that syncs up to my ear. If I think it's exciting enough, I'll incorporate it into the live set, and every week there might be a couple of new elements. I basically started ["All Day"] after about two years of performing live and experimenting with new material. I really mapped out on a text document maybe 75 percent of the album -- like, we'll start off with Black Sabbath with Ludacris and the drums from Jay-Z, and then it'll go into this or that.



Each of your last three albums has been longer than the one before, and the samples on "All Day" are much longer than the ones on "Night Ripper" or "Feed the Animals." Is your creative process changing?



Yeah, definitely. I don't want to re-create the album before, and I don't want the albums to be like a series, like "MTV's Party to Go Volume 1," "2" and "3," you know? I think with "Night Ripper" from 2006, I established a certain sound and people really took to that, and at that point I had a decision to make. [I could] cut up more samples and try to cram more in there and make it even more detailed, but the crowd that was coming out were more interested in hearing some of the more expanded pieces, and I think the goal over the past few years has been to make the compositions more complicated and more intense, but actually aesthetically more accessible. So I feel like the amount of attention to detail and the amount of layers is probably greater than ever, while simultaneously being overall an easier to listen to product.



One of the juxtapositions that a lot of critics have noted is Rihanna and Fugazi. Do critics overthink your music?



I've definitely read analysis that was very intelligent, but was on a really different level than the way I was thinking about it. That particular pairing, on a surface level, the Fugazi bass line owes a lot to reggae and dub culture, and I'm definitely influenced by that, and the Rihanna lyrics with the "rude boy" theme owe a lot to that culture as well, so I thought conceptually that was just a really good fit, two songs referencing the same music culture in very different ways. But ultimately, it linked up musically nicely in my ears.



What is your live show like? Do you have a strong visual presentation, or is it just you and a laptop?



The show's always been a huge part of this whole project, and in the early days it was just me and a laptop. But even way back eight years ago, I always wanted to put on a performance. I trigger all the samples in real time, so I do have to be behind the computer like 95 percent of the time, but it's loop-based software, so I always have the freedom to just let something ride for a little bit and get in the crowd or scream on the microphone or jump on top of somebody. Now I have a couple of friends who come out on the road with me who are basically fun ambassadors, and they have these homemade machines that shoot toilet paper streamers into the audience, and homemade confetti blowers, and all these homemade props, just to make it as crazy and festive as possible.



Does doing this change how you listen to music? Can you listen to a whole song from beginning to end without envisioning where it would fit into a mix, or how it could be combined with something else?



Things jump out at me at certain times, and it's undeniable. But I kind of get in and out of the mode of hunting for samples, so if I'm just listening to music or checking email or driving in the car, I'm usually not thinking about it so much. But there's times where I'll be preparing for a tour and I'll say, 'I don't have enough early '90s electronic pop in my set, I really need to find more of that.' So I'll go on the hunt and be flicking through stations or flicking through CDs, and that's just a whole different style of listening to music. It's really just like skipping through and hunting for that sample.



Phil Freeman is a freelance journalist whose work has appeared in DownBeat, Jazziz, The Wire and the Village Voice, among other outlets. He is also the author of "Running the Voodoo Down: The Electric Music of Miles Davis" (Backbeat Books, 2005).