Gregg Gillis’ project Girl Talk has helped alter the way people understand electronic music. He'll be at the House of Blues at Showboat June 17.
Some say it’s the future of music. Others say it’s the end of music. Whatever it is, it can be summed up in two words, Girl Talk.
On Friday, June 17, Gregg Gillis [AKA Girl Talk] will return to Atlantic City, bringing his energetic, one-man-and-a-laptop show to the House of Blues.
The project, manned solely by Gillis — a former medical engineer turned digital music star — Girl Talk has helped alter the way people understand electronic music. Why? Girl Talk’s songs are essentially musical collages, or “mash-ups,” which are compositions made from various samples of musical material that are restructured into new songs.
Girl Talk’s mash-ups draw from a wide range of sources, spanning the last four decades of pop music. This means snippets of Jay-Z and Black Sabbath [and many others] could easily be featured on the same track, though you may have to hear it to believe it.
His latest record All Day, is a 71 minute-long pop collage, featuring 372 different samples.
While Girl Talk’s music has ruffled a few feathers — raising both legal questions and questions of authenticity — the practice of digital sampling, Gillis claims, is becoming a “fundamental part of making music in 2011.” And while he may be far from a traditional musician, his aim is to create music that is original and “innovative.”
“I want it to be progressive and interesting and musically different enough to make its mark,” says Gillis in a recent interview with Atlantic City Weekly. “This project has always been about really trying to make something interesting and new out of pop sources.”
If you think watching a man press buttons on a laptop isn’t an ideal live show, you’re probably right. But that’s not what a Girl Talk show is. Girl Talk performances are notoriously raucous: audience members fill the stage — alongside Gillis — and vigorously dance about. There are flying festoons of toilet paper and confetti and flashy lights.
Gillis himself — the collected and meticulous artist featured in the interview below — is nothing like his hyperactive, onstage counterpart, Girl Talk, who is famous for dancing to the point of utter exhaustion [along with many selected audience members] and stripping down to his drawers. All this, while having the presence of mind to cue literally hundreds of different samples and aligning them correctly.
“Once I get locked in and I start physically spazzing out, my mind is just entirely set on what samples I’m triggering,” says Gillis. “I’m not thinking about [much] more other than just taking my body to the physical extreme of dancing and clicking that mouse.”
Deadmau5, aka Joel Zimmeman hails from Niagara Falls, Ontario. His career began in the 1990s in concert with the “chiptune” movement.
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