The hottest mash-up DJ talks art, secrecy and tooth-breaking live shows

By Pat Healy

pat.healy@metro.us

Gregg Gillis works 40 hours a week as a biomedical engineer in Pittsburgh. The other hours, under the moniker of Girl Talk, he is arguably the most heralded new mash-up DJ in the country. For the uninitiated, mash-ups are new pieces of music made by pairing elements of pre-existing songs. What makes Gillis unique, and what has garnered him opening slots for Kanye West and Gnarls Barkley and the attention of major music mags is his 2006 compilation “Night Ripper,” which pairs raps from the likes of Biggie, Busta and Young Jeezy with back-beats and breaks from hundreds of seemingly incongruous sources like Boston, Elton John, Paula Abdul, Sonic Youth, and Neutral Milk Hotel. The weird thing is, it all works…perfectly.

Do people at work know about Girl Talk?

It’s kind of a weird situation where when I started working here about two years ago I just happened to not tell them because it didn’t come up. You know, it’s kind of a conservative crowd. Then things have just sort of spiraled out of control in the past six months or so. Now I would like to tell them but I can’t because I’m in too deep. If I were to tell them they might be like, ‘you were lying about this for the past few years?’ I’ve been trying not to mention it at all, and it’s been difficult. I only do weekend shows. …The Pittsburgh press, every time they do a story on me, everyone’s been cool to not use my real name, they just say Girl Talk, and they always use a photo where you can’t tell what my face looks like. It’s truly incognito.

So Girl Talk is not on your résumé?

If I didn’t have a job I wouldn’t be looking for one, but if I happened to start the job today I would tell them about it. It’s just that circumstances have guided me down this weird kind of Seinfeld-style social lie.

If you did put Girl Talk on your résumé what would the bullets say?

[Pauses to think] “Able to mix up a bunch of songs and take off my shirt simultaneously.” “Able to chug a beer and make a beat simultaneously.”

You’re hired! But let’s keep this interviewing going. Your earlier work was not quite as accessible or danceable. When did you realize that recognizable, accessible mash-ups were what you wanted to do?

I had heard mash-ups a bunch of times. There’s this guy from Columbus, Ohio named Evolution Control Committee, and he was really the first person to do a mash-up with an a cappella and it was Public Enemy over Herb Alpert. When I started the early Girl Talk stuff in 2000, I had heard mash-ups, and I liked some of them, but it wasn’t really what I was going for. Whenever I play live I try to make it sort of a party atmosphere and during the early days, when I was a bit more experimental, the highlights were the blatant samples. So slowly it was this obvious formula of ‘to get people hyped up, you drop all these recognizable chunks in kind of a re-contextualized fashion.’

A lot of the readers who aren’t familiar with the genre will probably wonder what you do live other than just pressing the ‘play’ button.

I use a program called Audiomulch live, and I think with “Night Ripper,” the sound of that was roughly developed, more so than other records, based on the sound of my live show. Every single day I sample some forms of music, and I just have this whole catalogue of samples. Before every live show I have these templates of loops set up that roughly, if you went through them and mixed them by hand, muting and un-muting and timing them up at the right time, it would sound roughly like my album. I go through this template and every single time I put something new…So I’m setting up the templates before each show, and that’s roughly my songwriting process, so once that’s set up and I try to go through it live it might sound sloppy, so I actually sit down and I practice the transitions. …Then it does become kind of this skillful thing where I actually have to perform these songs that I’ve written. …I like to interact with the crowd a lot and run around and get people fired up, but any time I actually leave the laptop, you’ll notice that the same source material is just looped over and over. Any time a change actually has to happen I have to be up there clicking the mouse.

So if somebody in the crowd yells, “Play ‘Smash Your Head!’” will you be able to play a version of that track that is recognizable as the one on the album?

Not necessarily. …It’s like if you take a band like Sonic Youth who has been together for 25 years and they do some older songs, they might not be able to put together an exact rendition of them, but the songs they rehearse and practice for that particular tour, regardless how new or old they are, they can nail. I’m pretty much only able to perform what I have provided for myself in any particular live show as a template. I try to set up a lot of options depending on how I feel so I can jump around a bit if I want to. I also try not to do too much stuff off the album as much as remixes of stuff from the album, just to keep it fresh for me and if people come out to multiple shows I don’t want to bore them or anything.

What percent of the material sample do you actually like?

I don’t sample anything ironically. It’s all sincere. I’ve always been a pop music enthusiast. If anything, I like to equalize everything and question the sincerity of everything. You know, how much more sincere is Neutral Milk Hotel compared to Two Live Crew? They’re all making records putting them out there and realizing that people are going to buy them and have a fan-base. Everyone who is on the record has released music publicly, which is taking a big step forward. To me, every form of music has its own merit. Everyone’s kind of going for their own thing, and you have to take that into account, but you can’t dismiss vulgar gangsta rap as something less legitimate than some heartfelt lyrics from Neutral Milk Hotel or something. That’s my only statement I’m trying to get across with the album. In general, back to the original question, I’m a fan of everything I sample.

How about all the easy listening stuff?

I think that’s an influence from my parents, especially the Chicago and James Taylor and Hall & Oates. It’s music that I hated as a kid, but at some point I started to love.

Is there ever an instance when you feel like you’re liberating a great riff from a crappy rest-of-the-song?

Occasionally. I’ve always felt that any song I can get into some individual part, whether it be the concept of it or the drum part. In almost any song I can find some merit to it. I’m kind of an easy-to-please guy. I think there’s musical and artistic value in everything. A lot of the times I’ll sample something from a song that’s not necessarily my favorite, but I’ll love the break-down, but that doesn’t mean if I take a guitar solo from a song that I didn’t like the rest of the song.

On most of the tracks on “Night Ripper” it’s the rappers who lead the song. Is it harder to do a mash-up with the vocals from rock songs?

I grew up listening to hip-hop and I’m a rap fan, but I think even if I was given the individual recording tracks to every album ever, I’d still make something that sounded roughly like this album, but it is convenient that hip-hop a cappella mixes are available on 12-inches and all over the Internet, whereas getting a rock a capella is very difficult. It’s mostly like Kansas “Carry On My Wayward Son,” and all these ‘70s vocal introductions that don’t really exist anymore. Also in rapping there’s a lot more monotone inflections in the voices, and with vocalists going all over the map it’s sometimes difficult to find things that match up musically.

“Night Ripper” is such a rock geek’s dream. With each passing bar of music you unveil a new “how did he think of that?” Is there one track on there that you as the creator are more psyched about than others?

When I put it together I can’t even remember what I liked at the time, but since then I’m obviously influenced by anything I read. To me it seems like the fan favorite is Biggie Smalls’ “Juicy” on top of Elton John’s “Tiny Dancer.” It’s funny because even though when I’m putting this music together I never do it ironically, I realize some of the juxtapositions are funny and I try to walk that thin line between having something be funny and musically good and simultaneously not too corny, and when I put that together I loved the way it sounded but I was really convinced it was going to be too corny. I played it for my friends because I thought it might be too much for people to stomach but everybody kind of sites that as the peak point on the album.

Are you still able to enjoy music or do you hear everything as a potential break?

When I listen to the radio sometimes it becomes a little stressful, like when I hear three songs in a row that I want to sample and I can’t be in front of the computer right then, but it hasn’t really changed the way I listen to music. I think I have a very obvious attention deficit in making music but listening to music I think I’m pretty focused….I’m always thinking about it though.

Working 40 hours a week, how do you have time to do all that you do?

It’s a little intense, the type of music I do. If you’re in a rock band you can put out an album and go out on tour and just play those songs. But with me, now a lot of remix requests are rolling in from bands so there’s deadlines for those. …I drive home, do an interview 50 percent of the days, get home at 7 o’ clock, try to get something to eat, and then probably work on music until at least midnight, and then try to go over my girlfriend’s house for at least a minute. It’s been incredibly busy, but it’s cool because it’s just me and a laptop on tour. Every Friday I duck out of work an hour or two early, go to the airport, and do a Friday show, a Saturday show, and come back Sunday. I kind of lost my own personal social life a bit but I have no room to complain because it’s a good time.

Your press release specifically asks me not to ask about legal issues. I’m not necessarily asking. I’m just saying that as a statement.

Right.

OK, so now I’m asking. How come?

The quick answer is that nothing’s happened so far, but I have to kind of limit my comments just in case something does happen and I’ve made some bonehead statement that someone might use publicly. …The statement I’ve been issuing is that I think the music industry is starting to realize that this type of music isn’t really hurting anyone. No one’s really picking up my album instead of someone I sample. If anything, it’s just getting people excited about music in general, so I think that’s the reason the record labels haven’t really had a problem because they realize, if anything it’s a promotional tool for their artists.

Any feedback from the artists?

I know people have had to have heard it, at least someone, but nobody’s gotten back to me. But the interesting thing is a lot of major labels, pretty much all of the four majors or some subsidiary of them, have been contacting me non-stop to say that they liked the album and are interested in working on something in the future. That’s been a very ironic situation, where you kind of have to fear the major labels when you’re doing this kind of thing, but all of these have been in a positive light.

The press release does say, however it’s OK for me to ask about your homecoming gig in November.

My parents came out, and my sister came out and it was her 10th-year high school reunion and there were all those people from her reunion there, and the show was just insane. I hadn’t played Pittsburgh for a long time and people were going nuts, and at the end of the show I don’t remember what I was doing, really. I was kind of drunk. I don’t remember what I was going for, but I dove over my dad’s head and crashed into one of my sister’s friends that she hadn’t seen in a long time, and I got up and felt my tooth and it was in pieces. It was still in there but it was just shattered. It was my left front tooth so I had to get it replaced the next day. …Luckily my dentist was cool about coming in on a Sunday because it would have been hard to explain a broken tooth at work on Monday.