Those about to sweat, we salute you.
If you’re planning on seeing Girl Talk play at the Henry Fonda Theater this weekend, prepare for a party of epically drenched proportions.
“I like to have a celebration,” said Gregg Gillis, aka Girl Talk. “I love when people are dancing and sweating.”
Gillis, who released his fourth Girl Talk album, “Feed the Animals,” earlier this summer to rave reviews, describes his music as a “sound collage … it’s just a big cut-and-paste exercise with pop music.” But this type of collage is not appropriate for an arts and crafts fair; it’s booty-shaking, dance-your-pants-off, so-hot-it’s-dirty party music.
For all of the complicated sounds he creates, Gillis relies solely on his laptop and its music-producing programs for his live shows. Essentially these are Top 40 pop songs mashed up on top of a golden oldie, on top of a hip-hop beat, with a few riffs from an indie song and rap vocals … and that’s just in the first 20 seconds.
On his 2006 release, “Night Ripper,” Gillis famously used Notorious B.I.G.’s anthem “Juicy” over Elton John’s “Tiny Dancer,” an aural combination that still elicits ecstatic responses from listeners and concert-goers. On “Feed the Animals” Gillis samples Air, Britney Spears, ? and the Mysterians, Jay-Z, The Cure, Soulja Boy, Radiohead and even late ’90s one-hit wonders Len ““ just to name a few of the hundreds.
There are layers upon layers of contemporary meshed with old, but the combination manages to create a hot, fresh sound.
“The idea has always been the same from the get-go of using Top 40 primarily as source material to make new music,” Gillis said. “But (at the beginning), the intentions were different and I was more interested in experimental electronic music … with my first release, I wasn’t necessarily trying to make dance music or anything you could party to.”
Girl Talk’s first album, “Secret Diary,” released in 2002 when Gillis was 18 years old, is hardly recognizable as his in the context of the dance party jams he’s known for today. While Top 40 is certainly a formative part of that early album, the experimental, glitchy production doesn’t quite lend itself to the bump ‘n’ grind-encouraging music he plays now.
Gillis’ musical inclinations began like many: as an obsessed high school kid futzing around in his bedroom all day, finding “the weirdest music possible” and recording music of his own. But once he started college at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, his musical preferences began to change in a way that heavily influenced the direction of his last two albums.
“Once I went to college, I was just ready to unleash a little bit more,” Gillis said. “I started to go out dancing more and going to more parties … that definitely became a heavy influence with the music. In college, I think I was like a lot of college kids who are just trying to get drunk and make out as much as possible.”
With so much touring, it could’ve been difficult to work on a whole new project, but Gillis used the opportunity of playing live shows to test new ideas and gauge his audience’s reaction. After a year and half on the road, Gillis realized he had enough tested material to produce a full-length album and spent the next six months editing.
“I had all these landmarks in my mind of the way the album should go and what I wanted to do with it,” Gillis said.
Many postgrads struggle to find even one job, but Gillis had two. Before he devoted his life to solely being a mash-up maverick, Gillis worked as a biomedical engineer in a Pittsburgh plant by day, but played shows across the country on the weekends as Girl Talk began to take off.
“It was pretty intense,” Gillis said. “It was definitely very grounding because the people at my work didn’t know I was doing the Girl Talk thing, so I would go do weekend shows and sell out venues and be signing autographs and things like that, and then get back to the cubicle on Monday. It was a nice reality check everyday and it kept me in line with real life. It was funny, but it just became overwhelming … I was just constantly traveling or working and just trying to cram too much in. I liked the job, I just couldn’t really do both.”
Before this current tour, Gillis had previously traveled the country alone, like a pop vigilante with a laptop, ready to slay people with his scalding beats, sharp hooks and electrifying enthusiasm in his focus for his craft. However, he now travels with a crew of friends who help out with visuals, sound, merch-selling and general fun-sponsoring. His live shows are preplanned out, but Gillis said that every show is different and constantly evolving.
“If I hear a song on the radio (that day), I can sit down on the tour bus or go backstage or to the hotel and sit down and immediately incorporate it into the set,” Gillis said. “I’m always trying new things out.”
Although Girl Talk has gotten the majority of his latest publicity and praise from bastions of indie music such as college radio and Web sites like pitchforkmedia.com, his fan base reaches beyond irony-loving hipsters hopping on the bandwagon of the next hot thing. Gillis attributes this wide appeal to people’s general interest in pop music and the ways in which it can be manipulated.
“I want to make transformative music, use familiar ideas and familiar melodies to make something new out of it,” Gillis said. “Some people say that they hate the radio, they hate pop music, but they like hearing me jumble it all together and mess it up … I think you can love pop or hate pop but still be interested in what’s going on.”