It all starts with the albums, mix master Girl Talk says
It would be hard to pick an artist that better symbolizes the music of right now than Girl Talk.
Not Justin Bieber. Not Kanye West. A 29-year-old ex-biomedical engineer from Pittsburgh named Gregg Gillis, with an uncommon ear for building new songs out of bits and pieces of other people's music, has transformed into the planet-spanning, one-man musical Zeitgeist known as Girl Talk.
Girl Talk, who is opening the new Stage AE in the North Side with two performances this weekend, is nowhere close to being the biggest-seller, of course. That's hard to do when you're giving away your music for free. His latest album, "All Day," can be downloaded at www.illegal-art.net.
It didn't take long for word to spread. The day it came out, Nov. 15, a headline on mtv.com noted sarcastically, "Girl Talk Apologizes for Breaking the Internet with 'All Day.'"
"A lot of people who come out to the shows probably don't even know I have records," Gillis says. "They just know it as some kind of live party thing."
Despite giving his music away online, Gillis' clear affection for the album format is charmingly old-fashioned. There are a lot of people issuing remixes of pop songs, and plenty creating mash-ups combining several songs. Not too many create 70-minute albums out of 350-plus samples, though.
"It's the medium I enjoy the most," Gillis says. "I still love buying full-length albums and listening to 40 or 60 minutes worth of music."
He wanted to take a different approach than 2008's "Feed the Animals."
"The idea was to make it more dynamic, if possible," he says. "I don't want to cram in more samples. I don't want to play a game of 'How much stuff can you fit in there?' I was interested in segments that had more breathing room, that were more fully developed musically -- and other segments that were very cut up, very precise. Going in both directions simultaneously, if possible. To me, the ultimate goal is to make a really involved, complex pop collage."
On earlier recordings, the sample lengths and addition of new samples were fairly consistent, if not predictable.
"The early stuff, like 'Night Ripper' (2006), would be focused on one two-second loop for a song. When that loop is done, you go on to a new loop. On the new record, for instance, it opens with Black Sabbath's 'War Pigs.' It starts with the vocal breakdown at the beginning of the song, and transitions into Ludacris rapping over the guitar part, then Ludacris rapping over a different guitar part, then transitions into the chorus of another guitar part. So it's really exploring many different elements from that sample source. The song is constantly changing, quickly, in the typical style of Girl Talk, but I'm staying with that Black Sabbath source material for a good two minutes straight."
It's the live shows that pay the bills, and have put Girl Talk in demand all over the world. Yet until fairly recently, the setup was usually just Gillis, his laptop, and a table to put it on.
The star of the show is, more or less, the crowd itself. Anyone can jump onstage and dance, and become part of the show. Unsurprisingly, this appealed to the YouTube/Twitter/Facebook generation.
But as the crowds have gotten bigger, Gillis has found that embracing chaos has its limits. Watching security guards freak out as the crowd rushes the stage is no longer part of the show.
"It's a bit more organized than it used to be," he says. "It used to really be a war.
"Some nights, my thighs would be bleeding from being pressed up against the table with, like, crazy amounts of force for an hour and a half."
At the Bonnaroo festival in Tennessee in 2009, there were thousands of people -- and it seemed like all of them wanted to be onstage.
"There were people standing on my table, stepping on my hands," Gillis says. "I'm, like, 10 minutes into the set, and people are climbing all over me, falling on and off the table -- complete madness. Luckily, the show only stopped a few times. People were cool enough that it didn't go over the edge and turn into a riot or anything like that."
Now, Gillis lets the venue know what to expect -- and there's a barricade set up for any crowd of more than 1,000 people.
What the show loses in spontaneity, though, it gains in high-tech stagecraft. The new show has light- and video-projection elements, created by the same crew who designed Girl Talk's New Year's Eve show in Chicago last year, where they built a multi-room house onstage for Gillis to perform in.
Additional Information:
Girl Talk
When: 7 p.m. Friday and Saturday
Admission: $22-25; $40 for both shows
Where : Stage AE, North Side
Details: 800-745-3000
