Published in the April 2007 issue of DJ Times Magazine
Volume 20 - Number 4
By Justin Hampton

     By now, Gregg Gillis—the man behind the mash-up entity Girl Talk—has probably lost count of how many artists he’s sampled throughout his three-CD career of murdering the modern R&B, rock and hip-hop classics. He’s certainly not about to give an estimate of the licensing fees he’d owe if he was to go legit for even one of his tracks. But he reckons, “It’d be like the financial equivalent of buying 30 horses and raising them throughout their entire lives. That includes all living expenses.”
     After all, the label he’s on ain’t named Illegal Art for nothing. Rather than cease-and-desists, however, the Pittsburgh-based Gillis has been receiving accolades from media outlets such as Spin, Rolling Stone and MTV.com, as well as earning a spot on the Wired NextFest alongside Beck and Mike Patton and an opening date for Kanye West. After all, if the mash-up technique is indeed an emerging art form, Gillis would have to be one of its most skilled artisans, cutting, pasting and distorting the hits into a music geek’s ultimate party-jam fantasy.
     Where else can you find mangled cuts assembled from insanely disparate acts like Nas, Neutral Milk Hotel, The Pixies, Kansas, Black Eyed Peas, Weezer, Sonic Youth, and Hall and Oates? Um, you probably can’t, but that’s the fun of it all. For their part, Illegal Art says that it has a prepared “Fair Use” legal defense, if the need arises.
     In creating these jams, Gillis—a biomedical engineer by day—isn’t as gear-heavy as one might expect. No, Gillis reveals his studio set-up to be as Spartan as any mash-up producer’s, with a George Foreman Grill and LeBron James poster flanking a PC running Adobe Audition and AudioMulch. In Audition, Gillis creates the beats, samples loops and chops all the tracks up. In this phase, Gillis is often working in miniature with multiple tracks of percussion and discrete song passages, so once he’s nailed down the BPMs and tempo, he’ll use a calculator “to figure out where things need to fit mathematically for precise rhythms and loops.”
     After that, he organizes everything in AudioMulch, and then hands it over to friends who work at professional studios for mastering. Having spent time in his early years in a noise band, Gillis has experience using synthesizers and brought them into the past two CDs, but his current CD, Night Ripper, is exclusively sample-based, and Girl Talk will likely stay this way for the foreseeable future.
     The MP3 version of Night Ripper boasts a 42-minute continuous mix of the album’s songs, a reflection of the album’s genesis in Girl Talk’s live performances. “I always try out new material when I perform live,” Gillis explains, “and after working with a number of combinations, some things just stick in my head. So what you hear on the new record is kind of my ‘best-of the past two years’ of live material.”
     For these performances, Gillis primarily uses AudioMulch to create a less predictable mix for the audience to enjoy. “I have templates of loops and samples set up that I know fit together, and before nearly every show, I go through these templates and try to find new and old material to substitute. I practice performing these templates, so it’s like my song-writing process. And when you see me live, every time there’s a change in the music and new samples come in and out, it’s me doing it by hand on the fly. It’s slightly ‘more loose’ than my records because I can’t click as quickly as I can edit.”
     Asked if he really needed anything else to do his job, Gillis could only offer, “I don’t really feel a need for much more gear right now; I’m comfortable with my sampling capabilities. But it would be solid to get, like, a fog machine or something in there to set the mood.”