Nylon - October 2008 - (Page 107) life of the party THE RELEASE OF FEED THE ANIMALS PROVES THAT GIRL TALK JUST WANTS TO HAVE FUN. BY SAMANTHA GILEWICZ. PHOTOGRAPHED BY DARKROOM DEMONS “I have a stalker,” says Gregg Gillis. “She’s been sending me MySpace messages for a couple of years, then started turning up at all my shows…and I think I saw her last night!” In a way, Gillis has asked for it: He does, after all, call himself Girl Talk and, during live sets, strips to his boxers and dances in the glow of his laptop, maniacally triggering samples until drunken revelers swarm the stage. And, as was the case on a recent good night, have sex at his feet. It’s a sweltering morning after one such show (sans fornication, though), and the Brooklyn playground where we’ve met seems to simmer in the heat. Gillis pulls his tangled hair back from his eyes, which are so blue they make Frank Sinatra’s look dull. “Girl Talk is so glossy it should be a 12-year-old girl’s band—it was sort of a sore thumb in a sea of guys with made-up words for band names,” he says. “When I started, I was affiliated with this overly serious scene that was kind of old-man-style, kind of…chin-strokey. So, I wanted to be the antithesis of that: something that didn’t sound like you were going to an art gallery to watch guys play with computers.” The first two albums that Gillis, a former biomedical engineer from Pittsburgh, PA, released were pretty avantgarde, but obscure instrumentation bowed to electronica and, eventually, the pop that runs rampant in Night Ripper (2006), a syncopated mash-up in which 2 Live Crew rub shoulders with Hall & Oates, and was so successful it allowed Gillis to finally quit his day job. Gillis doesn’t remix songs—he uses each bridge, vocal snippet, and synth scrape like an instrument to compose brand-new ones. In Feed the Animals, Gillis’s latest album, he sampled more than 300 FM favorites, all credited in the liner notes (“I probably sourced like 5,000 to get down to those 300”). It will be released by the anti-copyright collective, Illegal Art; Gillis is well aware of his Fair Use rights, and has yet to see a cease and desist, though there has always been much speculation about the legality of what he’s doing. “Nothing is really sacred to me. I’ve been doing it kind of renegade-style for eight years,” he says. The overall effect sounds like the product of sonic ADD, an interweaving of nostalgia and novelty, in which contemporary hits (M.I.A., Lil’ Wayne) richochet against vintage smashes (Earth, Wind & Fire), and guilty pleasures (Ace of Base). All of which, of course, are guaranteed to make the kids go bananas—exactly what Gillis wants. “Animals is too detailed to be the ultimate dance record,” he says, adding, “But I want the live shows to be a party— I want to, like, get in peoples’ faces and interact with them. And if there is an opportunity to jump in the crowd, sweat on someone, or steal their drink, I’ll do that, too.” As for what comes next, Gillis says “I think I’ll probably go back to biomedical engineering one day.” 107
For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.