Jterm Programming

When suddenly...

GIRL TALK

Gregg Gillis - also known as musical collagist Girl Talk - has been the subject of a quite a lot of bruit recently. Major national news sources like MSNBC, independent music media site Pitchfork, the slightly scandalous hunk-hunter Playgirl Magazine, the U.S. Congress and thousands of those pesky "weblogs" have all been spreading the gospel. Radio Arts Middlebury figured they'd jump on the bandwagon.

Said of this interview...

"... it's the [best] thing I've [heard] in ages!"

"...[Gillis] is thoughtprovoking, if not entierly [cool]."

"If looks could translate through radio, I'd say [Colin Foss] is horrendously [handsome]."

Listen to the full interview HERE.

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For those of us who haven’t read a major blog or music magazine recently – Girl Talk is a meta-pop music artist of huge proportions. His materials are the recognizable riffs and one-liners of the top 40 hits, the beats and basses of hip-hop, and the occasional indie morsel for those pitchfork media fanatics out there. He’s Gregg Gillis, and he makes a music that’s easy to pick apart, but hard to classify.

Gillis performed on the Middlebury campus Friday, January 18th. Radio Arts Middlebury's Colin Foss spoke with Gillis before his concert. This is the transcript.


Radio Arts: Your music isn’t just the work of a dance club DJ on speed. There’s a higher organization and most importantly an idea behind these seemingly random music encounters. What do you think the Smashing Pumpkins have to say to Fergie, for example?

Gregg Gillis: For me, I’m not trying to push any ideas or political statements on anyone – I do have particular views, and I’m happy to discuss them – but for me, conceptually music is about breaking down barriers. Artistically, I respect Fergie as much as I do Sonic Youth, even though certain bands are critically acclaimed and considered “real artists” and other more pop-oriented acts are sometimes dismissed. For me, anyone putting out CDs into the public is making an attempt to be heard, and even people who live off their music can be great artists. You can make great art and make money off it. For me, it’s all on the same level. You have to take into consideration their audience. When Sonic Youth makes a record, they have a particular style they’re going for. I don’t know why a lot of times music is dismissed not thinking about what they’re going for. A lot of pop music is beautiful art. They’re all these minds involved that create something that a lot of people in the world can get into. I break it down to where all the artists are on a similar level.

RA: Also, to see people at shows respond equally to every single bit of music that you use.

GG: I understand that a lot of people like my music but don’t like the source material I use for it; they just like the way I manipulate it. Other people just like the source material. I think it’s totally reasonable. With a lot of sample-based hip-hop, the artists the hip-hop artists are sampling arent’ necessarily the type of musicians that their audiences would listen to. Like Kanye West using Chaka Khan samples. Most fifteen-year-olds guys who are buying Kanye records don’t want to jam to Chaka Khan too much, but they like it in its particular context.

RA: Tell us a little bit about your technique. Do you save up thousands of samples on your computer and just test them out, or do you have a few songs in mind that you’d like to see work together?

GG: It’s a big trail-and-error process for me. I sit down and just sample, sample, sample – not really worrying about what I’m going to do with it. Isolating loops, hooks, random parts of songs. From there, I put the samples in real-time on program. I find these little bits and pieces of things that fit together, like a layer of three things. In a live show, all of the samples I have are interchanged with a click of the mouse. Basic arrangements are done beforehand. I can jump around with certain combinations of material I want to go to next, but the groundwork is laid before. I’ll work for hours at home just to change-up thirty seconds of live material. Eventually when I want to put out an album, I’ll look back at the highlights of the best material from live sets over the last year, year and a half.

RA: How do you decide on an album when a song stops and starts? You go through so many changes, mutations and cycles that by the end of a song, you’ve ended somewhere unrecognizable from where you’ve began.

GG: With Night Ripper at least, I built the album as one song. The track separation is somewhat arbitrary; I knew I was going to break it up into pop-style tracks. For the most part I just wanted it to flow continuously, but I had to break it up for easy navigation. You could go forever. The big challenge is not overwhelming one part of a song with too many samples. I could keep going and double the amount of samples from what I really want. It’s a challenge of finding something for me that is interesting and compositionally challenging but still not be too experimental to the point that people won’t enjoy it.

RA: You mentioned Night Ripper, your most recent solo album, which does seem like your most accessible. And it’s certainly seen some success. But what can we expect on your new album? Do you ever imagine using any original instrumentation?

GG: Little bits. On Night Ripper there are a few melodies on “Hold Up” and some beats that are original. There’s a minute-long keyboard part I wrote, and then I put together some stuff for the last track. On the new album - which I actually just started assembling yesterday - I have a lot of it drawn out. There’s about a minute and twenty seconds done, so I can’t say 100% what it’s going to sound like. On earlier albums, I felt a little bit like I was trying to prove myself on a laptop, almost showing off to some degree. It was about how fast I could chop up this many songs, make it fast and crazy but still together. Night Ripper was so well-received that it makes the pressure on me less. I don’t have to show off that I can chop up three-hundred songs in forty minutes. I think the album’s dense like the last one, but I’m going to let it breathe a little bit more. I’ll take the concepts of Night Ripper and hopefully make a better pop album out of it.

RA: Being somewhere in between a music producer and a music presenter and a music maker – are you ever at a loss as to what to do onstage?

GG: Not really. I mean in high school, I was in a noise band, and we just made experimental sounds and smashed up stuff. It was very performance-based. We took the music into consideration, but it was always performance first. As soon as I started Girl Talk, I though I was going to start a band all sample-based. I wasn’t going to be a DJ, I would just do sound collage and that’s what this whole project was going to be about. It wasn’t like I was making these collages and then I was asked to do something live. I’ve had many years now of playing shows in basements and opening up for bands in basements – it wasn’t dance clubs or parties. It was “here’s thirty minutes, get up on stage and put on a performance.” During shows these days, now that people come out to party and know my material a bit more, the performance end of it is so casual and easy for me because I can focus on the music more. I really try to engage the crowd. Basically, I need to be clicking the mouse every thirty seconds at least, but it’s loop-based, so if I can move away from the laptop and it will loop forever. Because of that I have a certain amount of freedom that a typical rock band doesn’t. I can actually physically hang-out and communicate with an audience.

RA: I went to go see a Dan Deacon show a while ago – a guy I know you’ve been pretty close to this tour – it was literally him and an iPod. How have you enjoyed your tours with him so far?

GG: Optimal. I’ve been a fan of his for a while. I’ve probably known Dan for four or five years now. I think we went through similar things in the past few years, going from complete obscurity to having a fan base that is five hundred times what it used to be. His last record that broke out was his third or fourth album ( I don’t even know) and mine was my third record. We’ve played plenty of shows with a relatively small cult following, and then all of a sudden overnight thanks to a few good reviews… it definitely is exciting. I used to see his shows in Pittsburg playing for five to thirty people. I always thought he was a great performer, but I never really imagined it on a larger scale. Before his record came out, we had a few shows where I got him to open up and it went over so great. Seeing him play to a sold-out show, where I had never seen him play in front of more than thirty people, was really exciting. By the time his record came out, everyone jumped on and was really behind him. He’s one of my favorite live performers. I love the way he manipulates an audience. He’s a great musician – blending pop band experimentation like what I’m trying to do, obviously in a different way. But sometimes it’s just how good his shows are, how he performs, just to be awestruck with how all these fifteen-year old kids are leaving their minds for this incredibly experimental ten-minute composition. I really respect him for things like that.

RA: You’ve just come back from abroad, haven’t you?

GG: Yeah I was in Australia for a bit.

RA: How do you feel about performing outside the U.S? Do you have any special considerations?

GG: Yeah, definitely. I haven’t toured abroad that much. Mainly because I had a day job until June, and I couldn’t get that many days off. Now that I’ve quit, I’ve been getting around a lot more. In the past month, I’ve done Europe and Australia. It’s different. Certain parts of the world don’t necessarily have your record and haven’t heard your music, whereas I think in the U.S. something very specific is going on. Each city is different, each crowd is different, but there’s a certain understanding across the landscape. People experiences things in a certain way, they read similar websites, there’s a strong word-of-mouth. I can’t really classify the U.S. as one big place, because every show is different, but at the same time I feel like I’m just not as exposed in other parts of the world. People get down, but it’s a bit more work. It’s refreshing in an old-school way. Playing in Europe a month ago – I did a ten-day tour – and people go nuts, but it really feels like playing a show two years ago. I’d show up, there’d be an audience who want to get down and party, but at the same time it won’t happen from the first second. You actually have to win them over and engage them. Whereas, I think a lot of my shows these days, people know you’re coming out to party – that’s a given – it just goes off. Also, my source material also is really American-based, especially the hip-hop, that sometimes in other parts of the world, it hasn’t dropped big yet – maybe never will. I don’t like to cater, though, to any crowd, because I like to present this like a band that would play the same set in Dublin as they would in New York City. But when you get down to it, it’s a matter of getting over there and exposing yourself to them.

RA: And now that you’re back in the states, you’re playing a college campus, among other places. Have you performed at a college before?

GG: Oh yeah, a bunch.

RA: It’s a different crowd, but how do you feel performing there?

GG: They’re the most casual and easy shows. For instance, did they sell tickets to this show?

RA: Yeah, they did.

GG: How much were they?

RA: Ten big ones.

GG: Yeah, shows at colleges are typically because there’s a lot of money coming in. They’re cheap or free usually. They people who put them on are people who are really into the music, whereas in venues, it’s hit or miss. Sometimes, you’ll get a promoter who really likes your material, other times you’ll get someone who knows you can draw a large crowd and are just doing business. But at colleges, people actually want to see the show; that’s why they booked it. They could have booked anything; it’s not like they’re putting on a million shows, there’s only a select few. For me, it’s really easy. People are enthusiastic and I’m enthusiastic. And I really like it when shows are cheap or free just because it drops the level of importance. It’s just like “this is it, let’s have fun.”

RA: Do you remember any of the bands the came to campus when you were in college?

GG: We had a good activities board. There were some big shows, like George Clinton and Parliament Funkadelic, Andrew WK. We had shows every Wednesday so I kinda played there myself sometimes. I think Of Montreal played there before they broke out. A lot of great shows, and it was really regular, too.

RA: I gotta say, it was a relief to see that you were performing here. I think it’s hard to get people to come up to Vermont, so thanks for coming.

GG: I’ve actually never been to Vermont. First time.

RA: I’ve been thinking; your music is so reflective about pop music itself, do you imagine that if one of your songs ever makes it to the top 40, will pop music implode?

GG [laughs]: I don’t think it will be me, but I think it will happen at some point naturally. Back in – I don’t know – the 30s or 40s, you could say “can you imagine a cover of an older song making the top 40? Would that be some post-modern headf**k?” And it happened. If you were in the 70s or 60s when samplers first came out, you could say “can you imagine someone actually physically taking an older song, manipulating it, putting their own words on top of it, and that making the top 40?” And that’s happened slowly with rap music. People find out ways to use technology and minimize the cost put in to making music. Something that always happens. Sampling does that. Oh anyway! There are remixes on the techno/trance end that becoming huge top 40 songs every once in a while. I think that a collage or a straight mash-up like that becoming a hit single at some point. I don’t know if it will be during my era, but I definitely see it happening.

RA: You’ve talked a lot about the “mash-up” genre in other interviews – especially about its popularity and accessibility. Do you think that in ten years kids will be asking for audio editing software instead of guitars for Christmas?

GG: I think it’s happening now. It’s crazy. Even in my own experience – I’ve been doing this since 2000 – back then doing remixes on computers seems so limited. Now, it’s like every song that comes out, especially hip hop songs, there’s a million remixes that pop up on the internet instantaneously. I feel like so many kids are getting into it, so many kids are making beats, and doing hip hop and its remixes. I don’t see it dying out anytime soon. People are so used to using their computers. Even graphic design on Photoshop for example, is so widespread compared to ten years ago. I see that happening [with music] soon. Especially even with Guitar Hero and video games like that, I think a good beat production-style game will be very big, where you can remix any song in an easier to use thing. This will be very common in the future.

RA: Well, Gregg. Thank you much for talking with me today.

GG: Cool, nice chatting.