Girl Talk “does a Radiohead”…

The ultimate party guy Greg Gillis is a respectable biomedical engineer by day, but when he gets into his car at 5pm, he transforms into the mega mashup/remix-master Girl Talk. He’s been whisking himself away on weekends to play awesome DJ sets like the face-meltingly good one he did in Auckland, New Zealand last year. He regularly gives himself the daunting, hilarious and downright awesome task of coupling Kelly Clarkson with Blur, Britney Spears with Air, Of Montreal with Prince, Radiohead with Jay Z, Lil Mama with Metallica, etc, all to make his unique brand of awesome, amalgamated dance music.

He’s now released a mere selection of this, the cream of the crop, in his latest killer album, Feed The Animals. The enticing tunes from this are, so far, only available on the internet. You can pay whatever you goddamn feel like, and if you choose $0.00 they even ask why. Politely. Are you: A) Planning to pay later? B) Can’t afford to pay anything? C) Part of the music press or industry? Gregg doesn’t really care. When I talked to him on the eve of his New Zealand show last year he seemed much more concerned with perfectly beat-matching contemporary hip hop and R&B hits with classic grunge. His favourite band is, of course, Nirvana.

Gregg said he got into his current method of making music out of pure rebellion. “It felt like a complete punk rock effort of chopping up a familiar song and mangling it and doing whatever you want and manipulating this huge pop song, and that was very appealing to me. So I kinda got into doing computer music through that and from then I was just really into pop music, so I just tried to incorporate everything I’m into into the song… It’s definitely one of my goals to re-contextualise it to the point of becoming its own thing.”

“I grew up listening to hip hop and listening to a lot of Public Enemy, and stuff produced by the Bomb Squad, and in my mind that is right along the same lines of production that I’m doing, you know, layers with a lot of samples,” he says.

“I think there’s gonna be a shift in thinking soon enough, when sample-based music can be thought of as being completely original. So for me it’s like I’ve always dedicated my life to sample-based music, you know, with Night Ripper (his previous album) and things like that, our big goal would just be for people to interpret that as an original record, made out of samples. I think you know just someone just playing the guitar their whole life, you can really explore one instrument, I think sample-based music is very diverse and an incredible tool, so I think I’m gonna continue to explore sample-based stuff for a very long time.”

From M.I.A. to R. Kelly to the Rolling Stones to Nirvana, Gregg seems rather indiscriminate when plucking songs from the entire spectrum of pop to use for his tunes. I ask him what elements make for a good mashup/remix/whatever: “With my particular style of remixing I really like to use small parts, so it’s anything that’s isolated, so it’s like you know if there’s a drum break, or a keyboard bridge, or any individual part. I don’t really look for a sample I can make a whole song on, I just choose like a puzzle, I like to find little small parts that will fit into the puzzle; if there’s too many vocals or if it’s a full track, or if it’s a complete song, you may not layer up other things, you need something that has a distinct sound to it. I always look for a song first that I enjoy musically, but then that I also understand is minimal and not difficult to combine with something else.” Like The Velvet Underground with R Kelly! Amen. “I love when things are just slowed down… words are very punctuated in rap,” he laughs.

Mathematically quantising beats doesn’t take the fun out of making a sweet track for Gregg, either. “I have an engineering background, so this may sound nerdy but I kind of enjoy the meticulous approach to doing music, and I like going through the process of quantising the beats and making sure everything falls under the correct rhythm. I keep very detail-oriented about it, it’s almost like a lot of times you have to make creative decisions, as far as which work can be combined, but I see isolating samples and doing things with a calculator as more of a process, and I don’t have to be creative during that time, which is sometimes very relaxing for me to just sit down and do that for a few hours.”

He’s tirelessly energetic, too, even when he’s in the car coming home from his day job. “A lot of times when I turn on the radio or get in the car, and listen to the radio, it’s almost like I’m in research mode, and I do have a pen and pad in the car and I’m taking notes, so that in that sense I’m kind of always physically on the hunt for samples…”

“I think some people want to make muddled music, you know, some people like to make muddled music, some people like to make noisy music, some people like to make clean music…I think sometimes it (my music)’s misinterpreted as being too dancey to the point where I would probably slow it down a bit, whereas I think a lot of my influences, people like Squarepusher, Prefuse 73, and a lot of that music is about how quickly you can edit music together while still being true to it. But I think that style of production is a big influence today, like I definitely think you can’t overdo it. I try to walk that fine line between something that’s interesting as a composition yet not a complete mess.”

Girl Talk is a complete pleasure and inspiration to talk to, listen to and watch. Check out some sample MP3s from his spectacular dance-a-thon album, Feed The Animals, below, and click on the link at the bottom if you’d like to go to the page where you can download the whole album! And keep your eyes on Girl Talk, as he mentioned to me, he wouldn’t mind making a concept album in the future…

“A few years back I was thinking of doing a complete Hall and Oats remix album, cos they’re one of my favourites, so maybe something like that in the future, maybe a concept EP… I could get into that!”

Girl Talk – Play Your Part, Pt. 1: MP3

Girl Talk – Give Me A Beat: MP3

Girl Talk – Here’s The Thing: MP3

Download the whole album! Girl Talk – Feed The Animals

Posted by Sarah Gooding under U.S.A
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