Where hasn’t Girl Talk been the past three years, since the explosion after Night Ripper, the man, Gregg Gillis, has left his Biomedical Engineering job, released another album, and toured all over this small world of ours. So to celebrate this celebrodome status, we thought we’d get a couple words in with the man himself. – All photos via J. Caldwell, Thanks!
One thing that really came to me – more as a blinding epiphany than anything else – was how this fame has undermined my respect for the man. Everyone seems to be doing “mash-ups” now, but one thing that holds true to Gillis that is often overlooked (or oversimplified, as I did in the interview by saying mash-up instead of sample) – he doesn’t mash anything, he cuts, shortens, speeds, and splices samples into a soundscape that’s comparable to any sample based artist. In the interview he brings up the Avalanches, which got me thinking. There is no difference between the two, only the Avalanches (as well as DJ Shadow [also discussed] and Amon Tobin – Foley Room + more) manage to create a non pop enfused album, with more sound effects instead of songs, whereas Gillis manages to sample a good percentage of U.S hits, forever being mislabeled as a mash-up artist. The following is a lesson in all things Gillis, Enjoy.
Girl Talk – Let’s Start This Party Right (Secret Diary)
Girl Talk – Cleveland, Shake (Unstoppable)
Girl Talk – Smash Your Head (Night Ripper)
Girl Talk – Pump This Party (Girl Talk Murders Seattle)
Girl Talk – Here’s the Thing (Feed The Animals)
Grizzly Bear – Knife (Girl Talk Remix)
So how are things after Coachella and whatnot?
-Good, it’s just busy and I’m in the midst of a college tour, so it’s kind of the most extended session of shows I’ve done in a while. I’m just in the middle of that, i’ve got about two weeks left – just colleges every day.
Yeah, you’re showing up at our college actually, May 16th
-Yeah, that’s the very tail end of the tour. What school are you at?
UCSB. Thanks for fitting us in your hectic schedule
-Oh no problem.
So a lot of the other interviews I’ve read that you’ve done, you seem to have a variety of answers for where you got your name from. Care to grace us with another one?
-[Laughs] Well the name Girl Talk is a reference to many things, products, magazines, books. It’s a pop culture phrase. The whole point of choosing the name early on was basically to just stir things up a little within the small scene I was operating from.
-I came from a more experimental background and there were some very overly serious, borderline academic type electronic musicians. I wanted to pick a name that they would be embarrassed to play with. You know Girl Talk sounded exactly the opposite of a man playing a laptop, so that’s what I chose.
And how’s it feel now to be a household name?
-It’s been extremely bazaar, I feel very lucky that I had six years prior to that of nobody knowing my name. It kinda keeps you grounded and lets you know where you’re at. With any musician when you become successful, it’s partially because you did something that was musically interesting to people, and it’s partially because you got lucky. There’s a whole system of how these things work and I just feel really lucky for how things went down.
-I think after Night Ripper everything was very surreal, you know, headlining a 200 person club and selling it out was surreal, then going to play a festival was surreal, then going to do this or that – one step after another that was just very crazy to what I had been doing to the years prior to that, and it’s just been a two or three year run of nonstop shows and playing and interviews and this and that, so I’ve kind of just grown into it. It’s been a thing where if I take a step back it’s just been very insane to me, but in the mean time it’s just been me constantly working on music and playing shows, so I don’t have too much time to reflect on how crazy things have gotten.
So then what do you do when you’re not on the road, is it all just working on material or do you have other hobbies besides that?
-I mean I like to just relax. I try to squeeze in as much as possible just ‘cuz when I’m playing shows I fiddle around with music every day, but it’s tough for me to actually get anything done unless I have a big chunk time, you know. The whole process for me is trial and error, so it’s helpful if I have ten hours to sit around and cut up different songs and try out different things – no pressure, just see what falls into place.
-That’s how I work best, so when I go home I like to just sit around and work with material, cut things up and obviously relax. I feel like on the road every night’s a party and I end up going out more than I expect to, there’s just always something going on and always some level of excitement, but I love sitting around and watching TV, going to fast food and laying on my couch.
Doesn’t everybody though.
-Absolutely
I recently got to see Dan Deacon down in LA and it seems like he’s coming up fast too. Are you planning on exiting the Girl Talk mash-up sphere and orient it towards your own material, or are you going to build on Feed the Animals now.
-Well with sample based music there’s many different directions you can go. You can do the mash up thing and do a fun-party sound or you can make more traditional pop music, do something like the Avalanches or DJ Shadow, or you can sound like Public Enemy. There’s just so many different ways to go, and sampling is my instrument of choice.
-So to me the ultimate goal is to make my own original material out of samples – I think it’s something where you can explore this realm of music or lifestyle. It’s like being able to pick up a guitar, you can sit there and make a variety of different music and different albums every year. I’ve really been doing sample based music since I was 16 years old, so it’s been a while. I still feel like I’m learning new things, and coming up with new ideas and new ways to do things.
-I like to mess around with lots of different music in my free time, but for right now I don’t see myself veering off from actual sample based music. This doesn’t mean it will necessarily sound like Feed the Animals, it could sound like anything, you could make it sound like noise, pop, or hip-hop. But yeah, I think within the world of cutting up pre-existing material and trying to make something new out of it, I feel comfortable doing that, it’s something I want to continue to explore.
So are you working on anything new now, or is it doing the touring thing?
-The way the process has always worked for me, even from the first the first album onto now, is that the new material is based around performing live. In the live setting it’s all sample triggering, and I cue up different loops and samples and it’s in real time, but I have to kind of prepare that material to execute it. Basically when you see the set now, which changes from night to night, typically it’s about 25-50% new material, then on top of that there’s about 25% reinterpretation of previous albums material. I would hate to get up there and constantly do material from Feed the Animals or Night Ripper straight up, I like to constantly be remixing all that material and new material.
-So that’s kind of where I’m at now, where I have a lot of new stuff and a lot of ideas I like playing with live that I think have been going over well, but simultaneously I don’t try and not be concerned about how that’s going to impact an album. I just work constantly for the live show and at some point I’ll have enough material where I’ll feel comfortable developing that live material into album based material.
Just comparing Night Ripper and Feed the Animals, it really seems like Feed the Animals has a more planned soundscape of peaks and valleys – it really seems like it slows down a bit more . Do you feel that just from experience with the live shows you do, that you meant to work these speed shifts into the album or did it just come automatically?
-I think that was something that was definitely pre-planned, and that’s the nice thing about working the way I do. Sitting down to do Feed the Animals, I knew exactly where it was going to begin, where it was going to end, and I had all these highlight points within the set. Within the show I like to work within pop music, but I like it to be a mixture, you know like drop some samples that I know people arn’t going to recognize and I like to drop other samples that I know people will recognize, so I think it’s always a balance of going up and down, up and down.
-I like it to be an overwhelming pop experience, a hurricane of pop music in a way, but I do like to keep some subtle aspects in there and play some things I know will be a bit less intense, dropping samples of something a little soothing or softer that I know people arn’t going to be jumping up and down for – It helps keep the whole show and album going.
-I think everything on the album and during the live show kind of relates to what happens before and what’s going to happen after, so I try and keep it as eclectic as possible. I don’t want to stay in any one energy, I like to jump around as much as possible, so I think going into this album it felt like I had a lot more material prepared infront of me than I had for Night Ripper.
-I feel Night Ripper took me longer to put together because I was almost making it up as I went along, I wasn’t playing that many shows, so I had some idea, but I was just figuring it out in real time. Whereas with Feed the Animals, like I mentioned before, I had a clear idea of what I wanted to do and I had a clear idea of specific parts and how those related to each other, so in my mind Feed the Animals was a more thought out process based on how many shows I had prior to it.
-Prior to Night Ripper I played as much as I could, but that was maybe once a month, and after Night Ripper it was every single weekend or doing full month long tours.
-Also in between the period of Night Ripper and Feed the Animals I quit my job, so that freed up the most time I ever had in my life to prepare for music. So going into Feed the Animals I had a lot more time on my hands and a lot more energy focused on making music.
Then with your live shows do you know what kind of venue you’re going into beforehand and do you orient your show towards that? I was reading that you played a Spin show in some swanky club and you said that wasn’t really your scene, so how do things like that affect the show?
-The material every show – I don’t pre-plan anything too specific for many shows, unless it’s like a festival where I’m playing with some of my favorite artists, like I’m playing a show with Springsteen or Nine Inch Nails or Kayne, then I may do remixes of them because I know they’re there, and I know people are excited to see them. In general I like to treat the project like a band, and that’s kind of why i’ve always liked playing at live band settings and not at dance clubs.
-I think a traditional DJ can go into many different style clubs and play at 12 in the afternoon or on a beach or play at a nightclub for hip-hop or do techno night or whatever and be able to play to that sort crowd. Whereas with my material I feel I’m not there to necessarily just play songs for people, I want to play Girl Talk songs; I want it to be entirely my own material all Girl Talk made remixes, so when I go into any club I like to play the way I would anywhere else and I think when I perform live I have more material that I have prepared than I actually want to get through, so I jump around depending on what I think the crowd will react too. So I definitely react in that way based on where it’s going or how people are reacting in real time.
-Overall it’s that working on [new] music is a slow process for me, it’s taken me about two years to do an album which is typically 40-50 minutes worth of music, so it’d difficult for me to fundamentally change the live show in any way. If I do changes in any weekend, it’s usually just a 30 second to a minute ordeal, I can’t just flip the entire thing around overnight you know, so where ever I go I like to play the set and if it doesn’t go over then I just work hard to make the performance interesting to people. If people stand still or hate it or whatever, it’s fine to me.
-It’s kind of like if you were in a rock band and you showed up at a venue and people didn’t like it, you wouldn’t necessarily change your sound, you might change your setlist up a bit, but you’re still going to stick to the songs that you wrote and took time putting together, and that’s kind of the way I like to play it too.
Another thing that interests me is what the difference is between the States and Europe, I’ve never actually been over there and it seems like they’d be two totally different worlds.
-I mean I love playing in the states, I feel the whole project has been developed here and I’ve had many year of just tooling around, and I feel like the press exposure over here has been a lot larger, so I feel like people have known about this a lot longer and I’ve been able to play a lot more festivals. So the style of music I’m doing and the style of performance I’m doing, it’s more familiar to people [here]. Along with that it kind of makes it easier, there’s an etiquette established for what you do at a Girl Talk show, and what it’s going to be like. And that’s a cool thing, when people show up and they know what to do, and they’re all ready to get down and party.
-The last tour I did in Europe was great, every show sold out. I feel like things are picking up over there a bit more, but there’s a different environment. It all depends on the club, who books you, and what’s going on. When I play in the states, back in the days when I started, I never played at dance clubs. It was always something where I’d play with live bands. I played at art galleries, basements, or at a bar with a hip-hop group or whatever. It was always intended as a live show. The style of music I was doing was never really fit for any dance clubs, specially back then.
-I feel like in Europe, the idea of – this isn’t everywhere, just some specific countries – the idea of performing as a electronic musician or a DJ is viewed differently than it is over here, and i feel like my whole show and the performance, and even the music, is all a response to what I knew growing up in the United States. I try and make a performance out of it, get people up on the stage, jump in the crowd, because the shows I was playing at when I was younger needed that, you know you just can’t stand still, people would just cast you off.
-Whereas I think in certain areas of Europe playing standing still behind a laptop, or DJing records or whatever, might have been more acceptable as a show, so certain cities I’ll show up over there and they would have heard my record, but maybe not seen the show and they’re expecting someone to be up there with turntables and standing still and kind of doing the more traditional DJ roll.
-I think in certain cities when I get up there and make an actual performance out of it and start interacting with the crowd and doing that sort of thing, they’re just slightly foreign to that. They just haven’t seen or didn’t expect it out of this style of music, which I don’t think is a bad thing, they just kind of interpret it different based on the way they understand music; it’s just a different history and everyone grows up in a different environment and they understand performance in very different ways.
-What I do is very much influenced by growing up in the Pittsburgh, Cleveland area and just the shows I’ve seen and the shows I’ve participated in.
Last question – craziest thing fans have done on stage?
-I’ve seen people have sex on stage, which I think is about as crazy as it can get.
Amon Tobin – Bloodstone (Foley Room)
The Avalanches – Since I Left You (Since I left You)
DJ Shadow – Organ Donor (Endtroducing)
ahhh,great work