Beat Making and Risk Taking With Pittsburgh’s Girl Talk

Gregg Gillis sits on his couch, furiously tapping away on his laptop. It’s time to go to work…. Gregg Gillis sits on his couch, furiously tapping away on his laptop. It’s time to go to work.

The blinds are drawn in the front room of his quaint, barely-furnished home in Pittsburgh’s Polish Hill neighborhood, casting a soft red glow on the computer screen that bounces up to his quickly scanning eyes.

He wears an old flannel shirt, faded Chicago Bulls gym shorts and slippers. This is about as dressed up as he’ll ever get for work.

He opens a folder on his computer full of hundreds of nondescript files. Each one is a speck of what will eventually become music — a single snare drum hit, a low bass tone.

Gillis clicks and drags a half dozen out of the folder.

“Here’s a heavy bass tone… we’ll use this one and distort it,” he says.

His words can barely keep up with his copying, pasting, listening, cutting and tweaking. He’s obsessive about details, and adjusts every level, every tone. In about 10 minutes, he’s built a four second beat from scratch.

Ladies and gentlemen, meet Girl Talk.

Equal parts pop music junkie, mad scientist and producer, Gillis, who creates music under the alias Girl Talk, has devoted the last half-decade of his life to perfecting the art of the mash-up. That is, music created solely from digital samples taken from other songs, spliced into a neon patchwork quilt of recognizable beats, vocal tracks and melodies.

For Gillis, though, the mash-up isn’t simply pairing one song to another. Girl Talk music, he said, is transformative. By using only brief hints of each song swirled together, his work is more like a musical Jackson Pollock painting — snippets of hundreds of songs pieced together in one frantic, rambunctious whole.

“There are maybe 10 samples at once but you can only make out two,” said Gillis.

Last summer’s Feed the Animals, Girl Talk’s fourth and best album, featured over 300 samples edited seamlessly together into one mind-blowing mash-up separated into 14 tracks. Gillis even considered releasing multiple editions, each starting at a different place of the work — the album’s got no true end, no real beginning. Play it on repeat and it’ll loop endlessly.

Nirvana’s “Lithium” battles Salt-n-Pepa’s “Push It” in one track. On another, Lil Wayne raps “Lollipop” over Red Hot Chili Peppers’ “Under the Bridge” just before AC/DC, Outkast, George Harrison and Chamillionaire all show up.

Also showing up are Girl Talks’ fans — tons of them, and every one ready to party. Girl Talk shows feature simply Gillis alone with his laptop, mixing his samples live in the center of audience rave-ups that verge on dance-euphoria. Proud fans climb onstage and bounce around Gillis as he taps away at the keyboard.

“The audience onstage — that’s my laser light show. That’s my pyrotechnics,” said Gillis.

Within minutes of the first beat of any show, Gregg Gillis becomes the sweaty, nearly naked eye of a feverous, pulsating dance party hurricane. Just try not to spill your beer on the computer.

Gillis grew up in Pittsburgh’s South Hills, a kid who, after attending Lollapalooza in 1995, constantly searched for, “what the extent of weird music was.” In high school, his experimental noise band, The Joysticks Battle the Scanfeed Relay to Your Skull (you read that right), were more interested in syncing skipping CD players and four tracks than writing teen love ballads.

“We had goals of making everyone hate us,” Gillis said.

But as Girl Talk, the moniker he adopted while studying biomedical engineering at Cleveland’s Case Western Reserve, Gillis embraced his love of unabashed, superficial pop music. You know, the stuff that hits are made of.

“In the underground, you need that critical push for people to like you. In that way, mainstream pop artists are more about what the fans want than any other type of music,” said Gillis. “I wanted to flip [my high school attitude] and make really populous music for everyone to like.”

Fast-forward through a few years that saw Gillis release two records of crude, frenetic mash-ups to the electronic music underground while working as an engineer, and, in 2006, Gillis dropped Night Ripper.

Girl Talk had created the ultimate party soundtrack — all the catchy choruses and hot beats, none of the filler.

But soon came grumblings about the law — Gillis hasn’t obtained, or even attempted to obtain, legal clearance for any of the hundreds of samples on his records. Could he get sued? The simple answer is, well, nobody knows. Gillis maintains that he’s safe under the fair use doctrine of U.S. copyright law, which protects a new work if it doesn’t damage the profitability of the original. So far, Gillis has stayed out of court. There’s simply too much to lose for the sampled artists, Gillis said.

“I can’t imagine that the people suing me wouldn’t look like the bad guys. Everyone knows the Lars story. Metallica lost a lot of street cred after that one,” he said, citing Metallica’s drummer’s 2001 legal battle with downloading giant Napster.

With Feed the Animals, Gillis has come to terms with his now tired Sample Renegade persona (he even samples Metallica’s “One”).

“If you interview everyone who walks in and out of Club Gravity, no one is there for the controversy. They’re there for the music,” said Gillis.

And with good reason — the sound collage of Feed the Animals is arguably the most comprehensive collection of pop music ever. And it’s all there on one album.

No wonder, then, that the album took Gillis over two years to complete. He often worked eight to 10 hours a day perfecting only a few seconds of music.

While the actual sample assembly of the record was compiled and finished from home, Gillis used live shows to generate ideas and crowd test which pairings worked the best.

“It was such a massive mountain to climb, because the more time I put into it, the more options [for new samples] I had,” said Gillis. “I could’ve spent 10 years — a lifetime — on the record. It’s never truly complete. The day I finished Feed the Animals I took the day off, but the next day I had new samples beyond the record to play live.”

Gillis cracked a grin, acknowledging the daunting task that he completed just last June, when Feed the Animals was released — as a pay-what-you-want download — online.

“I’m so happy I’m done.”

Gregg Gillis watches the Steelers every weekend. He frequents his favorite local dive, Gooski’s, for a drink on his nights off. And he shops at Giant Eagle every week, where, he said, people never recognize him.

But with his laptop, he throws the wildest parties in the world. And everyone’s invited.