LAPTOP POP
Gregg Gillis brings the mash-up mastery of Girl Talk to Charlottesville
By: |
Published: September 19, 2012 http://www2.the-burg.com/entertainment/2012/sep/19
 |
| METHOD MAN: Gillis is anything but random in is sampling |
Gregg
Gillis doesn't play guitar, bass, or drums. And the only keyboard he knows his
way around is the one attached to his laptop. He's definitively, in his own
words, not a DJ, at least not in the tradition two-turntables-and-a-microphone
sense. But he does make music. Plenty of it. Indeed, the 29-year-old Pittsburgh
native has made quite a name for himself under the musical moniker Girl Talk, a
project that began when he started messing around with sampling software as a
biomedical engineering student at Case Western in 2000. Inspired by an emerging
underground of experimental artists creating sub-genres with names like
glitch-hop and IDM, Gillis created his own remixes using whatever bits of songs
captured his fancy. That the success of Girl Talk, who headline the nTelos
Wireless Pavilion on Wednesday, September 19, allowed him to quit his
engineering job in 2007, says a lot about just how far his unconventional
approach to has come in the past dozen years.
Gillis's big breakthrough arrived in 2006,
with the release of Night Ripper, the
third Girl Talk album on his own Illegal Arts label. Composed of dozens upon
dozens of samples taken encompassing a broad spectrum of pop music — from
Abba to X-Ray Specs and beyond — the album seamlessly, if sometimes
jarringly, folded together hip-hop dance beats, hardcore raps, dance beats, and
rock riffs, creating what by then had come to be known as mash-ups. The kicker
was that Gillis hadn't cleared any of the samples. And, even as the buzz about
Girl Talk grew well beyond a circle of fellow riff rippers that had been around
since the a dude named Danger Mouse mashed up the Jay-Z's Black Album raps with backing tracks from the Beatles' "White
Album" on 2004's now infamous "The Grey Album," no lawsuits for
copywriter infringement were forthcoming.
Just call Gillis lucky. Or chalk his good
fortune up to the changing realities of the digital world. Either way, he's
continued freely appropriating from his favorite tunes as Girl Talk's stature
has grown well beyond anything Gillis ever imagined. His latest album, All Day, caused a number of servers to
crash when it was released as a free download on the Illegal Arts website. And
it wasn't long before mash-up aficionados were creating web pages dedicated to
detailing the 373 samples on All Day,
a disc that begins with Ludacris rapping over the roar of Black Sabbath's
"War Pigs" and ends, 71 minutes later, with the soothing piano chords
of John Lennon's "Imagine." Along the way, you'll catch snippets of
everything from Beastie Boys and Snoop Dogg, to Jane's Addiction and Radiohead,
to ELO and Simon and Garfunkel, all set to infectious dance grooves. It's a bit
like an iPod on shuffle gone wild, only there's clearly a method to the
madness, as Gillis deftly paints what amounts to a kind of musical collage that
he reworks every time he performs, laptop in hand.
When I caught up with Gillis, he was on a
short break from touring. We talked about the tools of his trade, the science
of mash-ups, and just how he's managed to get this far without being sued.
Here's some of what he had to say. . .
 |
| Girl Talk, Night Ripper (Illegal Arts) |
There's an art to what you do, but hasn't
software progressed to the point where just anybody with a little spare time
can create his or her own mash-ups fairly easily?
That is true. Anybody really can do
it. I feel like that's an exciting part
of electronic music. I've been doing this particular project for twelve years,
and I feel like I've learned a lot each year, and grown, and gotten better at
it. But there are kids making stuff in their bedrooms that's great. I'll admit
that there's still a slight mystery when it comes to someone standing on a
stage with a computer. I've been dealing with that for years. The big joke has
always been, he's probably just checking his email up there. But it's grown and
it's becoming legitimate. You'll find electronic music performers at festivals
and on the schedule at most venues. It's become the norm. That also means that
there are a lot of people in the audiences I play to who don't make electronic
music. They may not know how to play guitar or bass, but they automatically
accept it as legitimate when they see someone playing a rock show. I feel like
it will eventually reach that point with electronic music.
Do you think people just aren't quite ready
to take a guy with a laptop on stage seriously?
I never feel disrespected. And the idea
of faking it, or just pressing play and standing there, never really crossed my
mind. I started out trying to come up with a way to play live electronic music
that isn't prerecorded, and that's still what I'm doing.
If anyone can do it, how do you judge
whether a particular mash-up is good or not?
I don't know. I start by sampling music I
enjoy. But the goal is to make something transformative with that music. It's
like I'm taking these various puzzle pieces and forcing them together.
Occasionally they go together really smoothly. And more often they don't. So,
when I create something from these various sources and it comes together and
goes somewhere entirely new and it also sounds entirely natural then I've
succeeded. That's the goal. It's a big collage of music that I want to make
more and more complex while keeping it accessible. My aim is to add more and
more layers while maintaining a sense of organic flow, That, for lack of a
better word, is what makes it good in my mind.
All
Day strikes me as poppier than Night
Ripper, which seemed more discordant. Is
that something you were aiming for?
I didn't study music and I'm not formally
trained. So, when i listen back to Night
Ripper, I hear things that I probably wouldn't do today. I hear more
dissonance and more aggressive pitch manipulation. I still like it. But I'm
always trying to raise the bar for myself. One avenue would be to pile on the
samples and make it more chaotic. But I thought it would be more interesting to
go in a direction of trying to make something more accessible. For me, that
entails the art of putting together all these songs that don't necessarily
belong together. On Night Ripper, a
lot of the tracks were built on a beat, a melody, and vocals. On All Day it's subtle things that I know
most people don't really care about that get me really excited, like taking the
high-hat from a Stevie Wonder song recorded in the early ’70s, and this hand
clap is from Billy Joel and it's only coming out of one speaker, and the kick
drum is from a Nelly track from the early 2000s. I've also become more aware of
creating breathing room. There are also moments where it's hectic and chaotic,
which keeps the tracks from being predictable. It's something I actively
consider, because there's definitely not a rulebook when it comes to putting
together a pop collage album. It's something you make up as you go along. It
takes me about two years to make a record, so there's a lot of time to think
about the transitions.
I realize that All Day is a
free download, so you're not technically making any money from it directly, but
I have to ask how you've avoided getting sued?
It's hard to say exactly. But the timing
has been right because the industry's view of copywriter infringement has been
shifting. I mean, "The Grey Album" was hugely influential in the way
people looked at sample-based music. I always thought sample-based music would
remain an underground phenomenon. I believed it would become legal, but at the
same time, there's no way I could have predicted that it would become a big as
it has, that it would be anything more than a subculture. So, when Night Ripper got hype behind it and
started getting press focused around the legal side of sampling, I thought
there might be a problem. As time went on, there wasn't. I started to hear from
people at major labels, and it turned into them contacting me not about there
being a problem with using particular songs, but about checking out a new song
that they wanted me to use. So I think the reason I haven't been sued is that
the work I'm doing is transformative and it doesn't create competition for the
source material. Sometimes, it actually creates a new audience for that source
material.
No comments:
Post a Comment