RAGGED Exclusive: Up All Night with Girl Talk

Straight from the pages of the brand new issue of RAGGED, enjoy an excerpt from our feature cover story with Girl Talk here, and be sure to download your free PDF of the full issue here, for the rest of the article including additional photos from our shoot!

Gregg Gillis (aka Girl Talk) is sitting in the green room of Terminal 5 in New York City in an “I’ll Be Back” Terminator T-shirt and jeans, politely picking at the hummus and chips on the coffee table in front of him, his elbows resting on his thighs. He’s here to play the U.S. Open’s Rock the Set party, which kicks off the tennis match with the aforementioned rock (Girl Talk, Matt & Kim) and partying (nice treats passed on trays, free drinks and a red carpet). If you ask Gillis why he’s here, he’ll say, “Some tennis sports thing,” with a tone that you might get when asking a fourth grader about their math homework. His eyes widen a bit when he gets to talking about the Voodoo Music Experience—he’s excited to go to New Orleans, and he’s going to dress up for Halloween when he performs. As a kid, he once went dressed as a Nintendo Game Boy, in a costume he and his father fashioned from some cardboard boxes and paint. Gillis likes the holiday. And scary movies.

But in a few hours, he will perform to this crowd of athletes, socialites, celebrities and the people that follow them in fancy dresses and shoes that click; he will hunch over a rather clunky-looking laptop, moving and jumping nonstop, his brown hair shellacked to his face and neck with sweat. He will transform. And people will dance -— oh, will they dance. First, they’ll move, maybe, to that recognizable “ra-ra” of Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance,” flashing a look to a friend as the samples shift into something else entirely, breeding that rush that comes from a sound both familiar yet intangible, a chorus of different moments, beats and memories cascading all at once. At the end of the night they’ll be left with blisters on their feet, a pumping pulse and the inability to shake that Aphex Twin riff, the one they’d never heard before but will hum for days on end.

That, in essence, is Girl Talk.

“I’ve always liked playing to an audience who might not be into the project or know what it is about,” says Gillis, who first played with tissue as a biomedical engineer in Pittsburgh before quitting in 2007 to dedicate himself to Girl Talk. When All Day, his most recent release, was distributed for free online, the response was downright explosive. Logging 373 samples of everything from pop princess Christina Aguilera to ’90s heavy metal-ers White Zombie, sometimes looping five at a time, it was a masterpiece of modern pop tongue-in-cheekiness that got hipsters dancing to will.i.am. For Gillis, that’s the point. “If I’m going to do a Kelly Clarkson remix, in weird way I’m trying to be almost confrontational about it. I like to jump around, I like to play Metallica and Miley Cyrus within a minute of each other. I don’t expect everyone to ultimately like the source material that I use, but I try to make something transformative out of it, so even if you don’t like that particular song, hopefully you like the way I rework it.”

Because, as your high school English teacher might say, the writing is in the rewriting. His nonstop, audience-on-stage, fluorescent, sweat-and-confetti-fest of a concert has helped to redefine the experience of live electronic music, and developed a seriously devoted following along the way. Gillis plays a lot of festivals—this year also included stops at Lollapalooza in Chicago and Outside Lands in San Francisco—since his sound is not only a surefire antidote to multi-hour exhaustion and band boredom, but also that, no matter what, everyone can find something in his mashups to dance to. And not only because they recognize it—they do—but because the delight’s in what’s been born anew. Listening to Girl Talk can kick you in the gut with nostalgia in the same way it can with its complexity.

(Continued in the pages of RAGGED…)

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posted by Staff