Girl Talk keeps the energy up

Local mashup king Gregg Gillis, better known as Girl Talk, makes remixes with the deftness of a… Local mashup king Gregg Gillis, better known as Girl Talk, makes remixes with the deftness of a stage magician: Lose focus and you might miss a sample. But, you’ll probably be too busy dancing to care.

On Saturday night, before the second of his two-day victory lap of Pittsburgh performances, Girl Talk’s fans — bedecked in glow sticks and hairspray — were loose and amiable, enjoying the North Shore’s newly minted venue Stage AE. Naturally, some were drunk, some were unruly and some — like the man that leaned on my shoulder and confided to me that I looked like “a great friend who I’ll never see again” — were in a mental realm of their own.

Thankfully, all individual interaction — in fact, all notions of individuality — evaporated when Pittsburgh’s premiere party-starter took the stage.

About 30 minutes after the two opening acts — noisy electro-pop duo TM Eye and boisterous Southern rapper Big K.R.I.T., both of whom, if paired together, might resemble something like Girl Talk — the lights dimmed, the projection screen awakened and a voice, at first too low to be distinguishable, began chanting: “Girl Talk … Girl Talk.” When its pitch raised, the audience was quick to join in the cheer.

Out hurried a lanky, long-haired man who wouldn’t seem out of place at a grunge concert. Clothed in a yellow sweatshirt and waving the requisite terrible towel, he grabbed the mic and hailed the already-euphoric crowd of hometown devotees with the first of his near-innumerable big-ups to Pittsburgh. A stream of lucky fans rushed onstage to join him. Gillis’ laptop — the nexus of his noisemaking — was set in motion.

Soon, Stage AE — a slick, industrial mini-arena — was awash in bass, beats and flailing limbs, and a killer remix of the Wu-Tang Clan’s “C.R.E.A.M.” had everyone in a ’90s rap funk. Supplementing the revelry were balloons, giant, inflatable tubes and stage crew-manned toilet-paper dispensers that produced oddly beautiful showers of snow-white tissue. Somehow, the energy level never dipped.

To enumerate Gillis’ samples — Phoenix’s “1901”; Ol’ Dirty Bastard’s “Shimmy Shimmy Ya”; The Darkness’ “I Believe in a Thing Called Love” — belies the fact that, in a Girl Talk show, all songs are rendered anew, almost unrecognizable from their pre-mashup form. Thankfully, Gillis treats their reincarnation with care: While it’s easy to lose sight of nuances in a writhing mosh pit, it doesn’t take a practiced DJ to realize Gillis’ arrangements are some of the most impeccably constructed in the business.

Accordingly, despite the encyclopedic nature of his sample catalog, there is such a thing as a typical Girl Talk song: mainstream rap vocals entangled with popular rock instrumentation — a highlight was the mashup of Ludacris’ “Move Bitch” and Black Sabbath’s “War Pigs.” It’s to this artist’s credit that for the frantic, near-seamless hour-and-a-half marathon, this formula never once seemed at the end of its novelty.

If there is any complaint to be made about Gillis’ performance, it’s that there was little, if any, diversity in his music’s emotional palate: with the possible exception of the poignant “Imagine” remix, every moment from beginning to end was intended to inspire ecstasy and abandon. Naturally, this is what this species of show — more akin to a club rave than a traditional concert — is for, and nobody entered Stage AE last Saturday expecting a reflective or solemn experience à la Yo-Yo Ma. Nonetheless, as long as Gillis is on a mission to clash together virtually all songs in pop music history, it would be a refreshing break to see him piece together something a little weightier.

In the end, what Girl Talk is doing is both avant-garde and unfailingly populist; he’s perhaps the ultimate bridge between Pitchfork and Top 40 radio. And at a time when musical taste is increasingly polarizing, there’s nothing more important than that.