HALLOWEEN PLAYLIST

DRESSED TO THRILL

Getting into character for Halloween

By: MATT ASHARE |
Published: October 31, 2012 http://www2.the-burg.com/entertainment

Lux Interior and Poison Ivy of the Carmps

Maybe I'm just suffering from zombie fatigue. Or, perhaps, I've just been starting to feel that the overload of supernatural slasher films that crowd cable movie channels in the weeks leading up to All Hallows Eve has reached a tipping point — one in which Freddy Krueger's nightmares on Elm Street have become as annoyingly, even cloyingly routine as the pre-Christmas television blitz of Jimmy Stewart's "It's A Wonderful Life," an otherworldly allegory of quite a different sort. Or, it could just be that among the folks I'm connected with on Facebook, there seem to be quite a few more folks dressing up as women in binders than ghoully grrrrls this election year.

       In any case, while I'm happy to concede that there have been plenty of scary monsters and super creeps over the years – from the lipsticked glam dudes of the ‘70s, to arch goths like Bauhaus, to monsters of metal mayhem like the traveling freak show that is GWAR – rock and roll has really always been about playing dress-up in one form or another, going all the way back to Elvis' rockabilly quaff. After all, John Fogerty wasn't really born on the bayou (he was a Berkeley boy, as in Northern California): He just did his best to look and sound like he was. And, when Pearl Jam's manager suggested that they were a band with "no image" in the early days of grunge, he was rightly reminded that no image is indeed an image.

       With all of that in mind, I've done my best to opt out of the usual monster mashes for this year's Halloween. Instead, I went looking for more playfully eclectic playlist of bands and artists who, at various points in their careers, found unique ways to complement their music with the sort of stylized attire that continues to tweak my appreciation for the tricks and treats of rock-and-roll pageantry. As is so often the case, this is just the tip an iceberg that arguably encompasses anyone who's ever taken the stage, as John and Paul surely knew even in their pre-Sgt Pepper incarnation as the suit-and-tied Fab Four. And, ultimately, that's really sort of the point.

1) Rasputina, "Transylvanian Concubine"

       In 1996, this trio of female cellists dolled up in Victorian-era corsets and lace made a minor splash with "Thanks for the Ether," a strangely alluring debut that incorporated spoken-word reveries and classically-tinged songs encompassed everything from Shakespeare ("Dig Ophelia") to Howard Hughes. This track, the disc's de-facto single, set distorted cellos and some poetic versifying that could have come straight outta an Anne Rice novel to an incessant beat. It actually caught the ear of Kurt Cobain, who had them open for Nirvana, and Marilyn Manson, who did a darker remix of the song for the 1997 EP "Transylvanian Regurgitations." Still, I mostly remember Rasputina for the clothes.

Dresden Dolls' Brian Viglione and Amanda Palmer

2) The Dresden Dolls, "Coin-Operated Boy"

       Moving out of the 19th-century and into the early-20th, the Dresden Dolls came on in whiteface and formal, color-coordinated, thrift-shop garb with their remarkable 2003 debut to offer up something singer/pianist Amanda Palmer termed "Brechtian punk cabaret," a cleverly nostalgic twist on the pre-war scene in Weimar Germany. With little more than drummer Brian Viglione bringing some punch to the performative party, Palmer delivers a deeply creepy tale of mechanical romance in this standout track from the self-titled album that launched her unlikely career as something of an international underground sensation.

3) The Cramps, "Strychnine"

       The self-proclaimed "hottest thing from the north to come out of the south," the Cramps pretty much held the patent on punkabilly from 1976 until frontman Lux Interior's death in 2009. This cover of a fairly deviant ode to the pleasures of poison by the ‘60s garage band the Sonics is one of the more straightforwardly sinister rave-ups, replete with plenty of reverb-drenched powerchords courtesy of guitarist Poison Ivy, from their amusingly titled 1980 album "Songs the Lord Taught Us."

The Damned's frontman Dave Vanian

4) The Damned, "Wait For the Blackout"

       Although they do have the distinction of being bona-fide members of the original, class of ‘76 British punks, the Damned never really quite reached the heights of the Clash or the Pistols. They did have their moments early on, particularly with the fast and furious outburst "New Rose," a semi-classic that gets covered from time to time. But it was with 1980's "The Black Album" (pre-dating Spinal Tap by four years) that singer Dave Vanian embraced his inner (and outer) vampire, and adopted a deep croon that lends this apocalyptic mini-epic its ominous overtones.

5) Kiss, "Rock and Roll All Nite"

       Sure, Kiss, in full make-up, are an obvious Halloween pick. But one of my favorite, if brief, periods in Kisstory is "Dressed to Kill," the 1976 album with the wry black-and-white cover shot of the band in full face paint, but wearing natty Fab Four-style suits rather than their full costumes. It's definitely a look, although, sadly, not one they stuck with for very long. And, the disc does end with one of their all-time greats, a peon to partying every day and then switching over to rock and roll once the sun has set.

6) New York Dolls, "Personality Crisis"

       It wouldn't be fair to bring up Kiss without giving these trashy New York City proto-punks their due because Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley got their idea for playing dress-up from the tongue-in-cheek, dime-store drag queen look the Dolls sported when they first emerged in the early ’70s with a twisted take on Rolling Stones androgyny. I'm sticking with "Personality Crisis," the song that best describes what the Dolls once embodied, when they released their self-titled debut in 1973.

7) The Rolling Stones, "Child of the Moon"

       And, now that we've mentioned the Stones, it's not always worth remembering that they took a somewhat misguided trip into Sgt. Peppery psychedelia in 1967, with "Their Satanic Majesties Request." But a few good things did come out of the era that had Mick dressing up like a wizard, pointy black hat and all, including the single "Jumpin' Jack Flash" and it's luminesque b-side, an all too often forgotten tune call "Child of the Moon."

8) Siouxsie and the Banshees, "Dear Prudence"

       As a sideways nod to the Fab Four, who changed costumes more than a few times in their short time together, here's an alluringly eerie rendition of one of their late-career "White Album" cuts by the post-punk queen of goth Siouxsie Sioux and her Banshees. Released in 1983, it became one of their bigger UK hits, and helped popularize her dark diva stylings here in the States.

9) Devo, "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction"

       While we're at the crossroads of post-punk/new-wave covers and Beatles/Stones tunes, it kinda doesn't get much better and/or weirder than Devo, in their matching futuristic spacesuits, doing a number on this Jagger/Richards classic. It’s hard to imagine what anybody made of this when the Akron-bred band came out of nowhere with "Q: Are We Not Men A: We Are Devo!" in 1978. And, it remains a truly strange, yet oddly accessible transmission from the punk-rock era.

David Bowie as Aladdin Sane

10) David Bowie, "Cracked Actor"

       Ziggy Stardust is admittedly one of the benchmarks for rock-and-roll costumery. But the quick wardrobe change the Thin White Duke, as he'd later be known, made directly after his tenure with the Spiders From Mars, into the more elusive and introspective Aladdin Sane (as in, "a lad insane"), is too often underrated. With a multi-colored lightening slash painted across his face, he brought on what he's called an Americanized version of his glam sham with r&b-tinged rockers like "The Jean Genie" and the suitably schizophrenic "Cracked Actor," a somewhat deeper "Aladdin Sane" cut.  

JOE STRUMMER

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AFTER CLASH

Joe Strummer’s Resurgent Hellcat Years

By: MATT ASHARE |
Published: October 22, 2012 http://www2.the-burg.com/entertainment

PAN-CULTURAL POPULIST: Strummer style.

One of my favorite Joe Strummer stories – and there are more than just a few – goes all the way back to the formative days of the Clash, when he and guitarist Mick Jones were working on the incendiary material that would become the band's groundbreaking 1977 self-titled debut. According to Jones, who played Paul McCartney to Strummer's John Lennon in their songwriting partnership, he’d come up with the makings of a tune called "I'm So Bored With You," a perfectly solid foundation for angry punk cannon fodder. But Strummer had a more provocative salvo in mind: he changed the title to "I'm So Bored With the U.S.A.," and quickly turned it into a searingly prescient, politically-charged indictment of some of the less savory aspects of the same country that had given the world the r&b music he'd cut his rock-and-roll teeth on.

       Conflict, contradiction, and controversy are just a few of the volatile elements that fueled Strummer, who died of an undiagnosed congenital heart defect at the age of 52 on December 22, 2002, and helped make the Clash the first truly mainstream punk band. It's also equally fair to credit his penchant for provocation with the premature demise of the Clash: After releasing five albums in five years, the band imploded when Strummer famously "fired" Jones in 1983. In a misguided move he'd come to regret, Strummer kept a back-to-basics version of the Clash sputtering along for a few more years. And then he more or less dropped out of the game for nearly a decade and a half, showing up from time to time on film soundtracks, dropping the mediocre solo album Earthquake Weather in 1989, and filling in as the frontman for the Irish band the Pogues on a couple of tours in the early-’90s.

       It took the punk-rock resurgence of the ‘90s, spearheaded by the Clash-revering California bands Green Day and Rancid to lure Strummer back to the fold. Indeed, it was Rancid frontman Tim Armstrong, a singer with a Strummeresque snarl and a very Clash-like affinity for marrying the raw roar of punk guitars with the rock-steady rhythms of reggae and ska, who helped facilitate Strummer's late-career return. In 1999, Armstrong signed Joe Strummer and his newly christened band the Mescaleros to his Epitaph imprint Hellcat Records and released their debut, a remarkably inspired return to form titled Rock Art and the X-Ray Style. Strummer followed up with the equally impressive Global A Go-Go two years later. And, in 2003, Streetcore, a disc Strummer had been recording at the time of his death, came out posthumously on Hellcat. All three discs have been remastered and reissued with bonus tracks by Armstrong's label. And all of that material, along with an additional 16 live tracks recorded at London's Acton Town Hall at a benefit the Mescaleros played in support of striking firemen on November 15, 2002, are part of The Hellcat Years, a downloadable, comprehensive "digital box set." 

       Although he never recaptured the commercial ground he reached with 1982's platinum-selling Clash classic Combat Rock during his Hellcat years, Strummer regained his artistic footing as a scowling yet soulful punk prophet, a pan-cultural populist who expanded the very notion of rebel rock to include everything from growling guitars to supple dub grooves – from simple folk-rock and r&b, to reggae, funk, hip-hop, and beyond. The static that begins the broadcast that is "Tony Adams," the first track from Rock Art and the X-Ray Style, signals that Strummer's plugging right back into the same sonic frequencies he explored back in ‘81 on the "This Is Radio Clash" single, a furious fusion of rap and rock that was rather well ahead of its time. As insistent guitars settle into a syncopated groove, the white noise clears and Strummer begins his broadcast: "Late breaking news, this just in. . . Tonight there was a power cut in the city of madness/And all the conversations died in the burst of a solar flare. . . And all the neon blew down funky Broadway/And shorted out the Eastern shore."

       The reggae-inflected drum fills and saxophone squalls that color the apocalyptic visions of "Tony Adams" may be a long way from the strident simplicity of the early Clash, but they're right in tune with the kind of subtle atmospherics Strummer and Jones were exploring on a deep Combat Rock track like "Straight to Hell." Freed from the basic guitar/bass/drum structure of a trad band, Strummer went further with the Mescaleros, appropriating sounds from Spain, Africa, and the Middle East without losing his rockist center on tracks like the relatively upbeat and laid-back "Sandpaper Blues" and the eerily unsettling reverie "Yalla Yalla," a funky, techno-tinged track that opens with an undeterred Strummer crooning, "Well, so long liberty/Let's forget you didn't show/Not in my time/But in our sons' and daughters' time/When you get the feeling/Call and you've got a room."    

       Not everything here is a multicultural mash-up. The largely acoustic "X-Ray Style" is, at heart, a campfire folk tune that finds Strummer counting stars and giving a sly shout-out to one of his heroes, rockabilly legend Eddie Cochran. And, "The Road to Rock 'n' Roll" is a straightforwardly soulful if somewhat sorrow-filled reflective track Strummer wrote for Johnny Cash. But, over the course of the 33 studio tracks from The Hellcat Years, which include a starkly solemn cover of Bob Marley's "Redemption Song," you get the sense that Strummer, vindicated and revitalized by ‘90s neo-punks like Rancid, was more determined than ever to push the stylistic envelop of a brand of music he helped to conceive. As for the two-dozen live tracks tacked on at the end, three of which feature Mick Jones sitting in on some Clash tunes, they're a somewhat wistful reminder that the fun Strummer had a special way of making songs as disparate as the Ramones' "Blitzkreig Bop," Jimmy Cliff's "The Harder They Come," and the trad blues tune "Junco Partner," feel like they all belonged together in a place I'll call Strummerville.

AIMEE MANN

REALITY BITES: 

Aimee Mann keeps her cool on the revealing new Charmer

By: MATT ASHARE |
Published: October 15, 2012 http://www2.the-burg.com/entertainment

INTIMACY ISSUES: Mann bares romantic wounds with wit and reserve

Last week, enigmatic songstress Tori Amos released Gold Dust, a classically styled collaboration with the Metropole Orchestra that takes 14 epic songs spanning her two decades as a solo artist and reworks them as baroque, cabaret-pop tunes. Just a couple of weeks earlier, dance-pop diva Pink delivered her version of a "grown-up" album, a playfully all-over-the-map collection of rockist power ballads, introspective acoustic folk, and, of course, dance-party anthems. Each, in its own gaudy, confessional way, fits nicely into a living-out-loud cultural milieu that values the vicarious thrill of the tell-all memoir and reality television. And both are more than likely to overshadow a very different kind of personal statement: the cooly reserved, artfully crafted retro-pop of Charmer, the eighth studio album by the LA-based singer/songwriter Aimee Mann.
    Mann knows a thing or two about being a charmer, or, at least, about fleeting nature of the charmed life. In 1985, she was a young, spiky haired, new-wave blond beauty fronting and playing bass in the Boston-based synth-rock band ’Til Tuesday when the very first single from their debut album became a hit on radio and, more importantly, MTV. Playing the part of a sheepishly stoic yet rebellious, leather jacketed lover caught in an oppressively buttoned-down relationship, Mann became a ubiquitous presence on MTV, as she acted out the drama of raging against the upper-middle class machine in her own coy manner. The song, "Voices Carry," catapulted ‘Til Tuesday into the emerging alternative mainstream. The video, with its cheesy narrative and clumsy overdubbed dialogue, won MTV's then coveted award for "Best New Artist." And the iconic image of Mann casting off the trappings of the good life to pursue her rock-and-roll dreams somewhat ironically left her trapped, for a time, in something akin to an ‘80s one-hit-wonder time capsule, as ‘Til Tuesday quickly faded from view.
    It would be the better part of a decade before Mann resurfaced as a solo artist in LA with 1993's critically lauded Whatever, an album that recast her as a whipsmart and sassy, seasoned songwriter with a keen talent for channeling wryly cynical observations into classic Beatlesque hooks and melodies. In her new guise, Mann's garnered praise from Elvis Costello and novelist Nick Hornby, to name just two prominent "critics." And her considerable contributions to the soundtrack for the Paul Thomas Anderson film Magnolia (1999), earned both an Oscar and Grammy nomination. She hasn't, however, come anywhere close to recapturing the commercial success she experienced with ‘Til Tuesday. And you get the sense that she's just fine with that.
    Indeed, until now, Mann's work has rather assiduously avoided touching on anything that might carry even the slightest echo of "Voices Carry." But it's been almost thirty years since "Voices Carry," bands as disparate as LCD Soundsystem, the Killers, and the Faint have cast the sound of ‘80s new wave in a more positive light, and, over the course of seven solo albums, Mann's unerringly established her bona-fides as a serious artist — so much so that she's finally willing to if not embrace, at least have a little fun with her ‘Til Tuesday past.
    To that end, she enlisted Tom Scharpling, a comic radio show host who served as a writer/executive producer for the show Monk, to direct a shot-for-shot satirical remake of the "Voices Carry" video, replete with dramatic overdubs, for "Labrador," a ruminative, mid-tempo rocker from Charmer that's also the disc de facto first single.  With characteristic understatement that clashes with and underscores the high drama of video's narrative, Mann recounts the dynamics of a dysfunctional friendship. "You lie so well, I could never even tell, what were facts in your artful rearranging" she intones against the easy strum of a guitar." And then, as the drums pick up and ringing piano chords enter the mix, she looks inward and admits, "I came back for more/And you laughed in my face and you rubbed it in/Cuz I'm a labrador/And I run when the gun drops the dove again."
    The contrast between the bright, hummable flow of the melody and the darker implications of the lyric are something of a Mann trademark. Paradoxically, the histrionics acted out in the video have never been her style. Although Mann's not afraid to mine her life for material, her delivery relies on sly subtleties, shifting perspectives, and delicately incisive jabs. On the disc's opening tune, the title track "Charmer," she takes aim at charismatic cad, leaning on a nostalgic analog synth hook as she observes, "When you're a charmer the world applauds/They don't know that secretly charmers feel like they're frauds." You get the sense that she's got someone specific targeted when she lands precisely polite punches like that. But she may also be speaking from personal experience.
    With only one of its eleven tracks clocking in over the four-minute mark, Charmer is a concise album, with few wasted words or notes. Mann approaches her art like a craft, carefully fashioning tight arrangements that suit her subjects, from the doomed lovers in the sprightly "Crazytown" to the resigned romantics in the more plaintive "Living a Lie," a beautifully sad duet with Shins frontman James Mercer. She does save the best line – "For every open arm there's a cold shoulder" – for herself, but she doesn't overplay it. For all the heated emotions that underpin the songwriting here, Mann's preferred mode is more smolder than burn, her voice more a whisper than a scream. Unlike Pink or Tori, who are more than happy to bare their wounds loudly, Mann creates allure by holding back just a bit, creating a kind of knowing intimacy that invites the listener in on the often devastating jokes. In the break-up ballad "Soon Enough," she's almost matter-of-fact as she nonchalantly concedes, "Soon enough you can say we made it up/Just for fun I guess/To make a mess/‘cause what's more fun than other people's hell." She got a point there. And she's also got what might be the best album of her career.

BAND OF HORSES

BREAKING SAD

Band of Horses take another resonant ride on the melancholy side

By: MATT ASHARE |  

Published: October 3, 2012 http://www2.the-burg.com/list/music-burg/

Band of Horses, Mirage Rock (Columbia)

BRINDELL'S BOYS: Band of Horses in their latest incarnation

Reliably sturdy, emotionally earnest, often nearly meditative mid-tempo Americana in the vein of Neil Young and Crazy Horse are some of the qualities that have characterized Band of Horses since 2004, when Ben Bridwell emerged from behind the drums of Seattle slo-core specialists Clarissa's Weird to front the group. But, while it wouldn't be quite right to suggest that Bridwell's overly sober, by reputation the thick-bearded singer-songwriter is certainly more somber than, say, playful.

       So it feels like it must be a sign of something – perhaps a loaded, coded message to his many minions — that Bridwell settled on a cleverly puckish title for Band of Horses' fourth album, their second since moving to the big leagues of Columbia Records and earning a Grammy nomination with 2010's Infinite Arms. Say it real fast three or four times in a row, and Mirage Rock begins to sound an awful lot like "garage rock," a style/genre that, like indie-rock, Bridwell has largely relinquished as Band of Horses have found footing somewhere in the general vicinity of what used to be called the mainstream.

       Swapping saddles isn't exactly new to Bridwell. The South Carolina native quickly became the only remaining founder of the original Band of Horses foursome. And, at this point, former members outnumber the current five-piece — Bridwell, keyboardist Ryan Monroe, guitarist Tyler Ramsey, bassist Bill Reynolds, and drummer Creighton Barrett — by a full two-to-one ratio.

       That said, Band of Horses have embodied a bedrock of consistency, even as various players have come and gone, in large part because Bridwell's distinctively haunting yet hearty falsetto, whether drenched in reverb or supported by spot-on harmonies, has remained so glaringly bare of artifice. And, even as his songwriting has evolved to incorporate more rootsy arrangements, churn-and-burn Crazy Horse guitars are still very much an elemental part of Bridwell's Band of Horses vision.

Band of Horses, Mirage Rock (Columbia)

      If "Infinite Arms" marked Bridwell's return to his native south (it was mostly recorded in North Carolina), then Mirage Rock signals a shift toward a rather eclectic vision of classic rock, as well as a determined attempt to leave the limitations of the garage behind without losing the illusion of grassroots intimacy. Rather than taking over the reigns of production, as the band did on Infinite Arms, they brought on a legend, Glyn Johns, whose considerable resume includes classics by the Who, the Stones, and Clapton, although it's probably more relevant that he also helped the Eagles find their country-rock footing in the early-‘70s, and did something similar for Ryan Adams just last year on Ashes & Fire.

       Johns has a well-tested talent for honing hooks, clarifying choruses, and subtly sharpening melodies that lends a kind of refined rawness to a recording. His deft touch is apparent from the first guitar-bursts on Mirage Rock. With drums pounding and powerchords roaring, Bridwell begins on a high note, crooning wordlessly "Awoo, woo" in an almost celebratory falsetto. The song's title, "Knock Knock," suggests there's a punchline coming, but it's not of the comic variety. "So, say it to me/Say it to my face/There's no time to be deserved or safe," Bridwell sings, as if for the first time in a long time he really is in a hurry to get somewhere. That place is a rock-solid chorus that finds him "knocking" over and over again on some unspecified door, an image that suggests he's pushing hard toward a creative breakthrough of some kind.

       After a chaotic intro, the next track, "How To Live," settles into a more measured groove, as big, ringing guitars create an anthemic atmosphere for a little world-weary introspection. "I really don't have to suffer/I still do it anyway/I'm a diamond in the rough/Or a dirt clod in the clay," Bridwell reflects in what might be the disc's most telling line: he may be a major player on a major label with a major producer, but Bridwell's comfort zone, as song titles like "Everything's Gonna Be Undone" and "Heartbreak on the 101" suggest, is still minor-key melancholy, unraveling relationships, and a kind of looming quotidian sadness. He revels in everyday details of decay: "There's no street lamps/Only three buildings/And one of them's vacant," he intones on the largely acoustic "Slow Cruel Hands of Time," an airy reverie that find him, "Back in my yard, where everything's just dull."

       With its jangly guitars, each chord drawn out into pretty arpeggios, and enigmatic imagery ("Sky is in the yard/Street cotton candy in the fall"), "Slow Cruel Hands of Time" is just one of several tracks here that owe a debt to R.E.M's reinvention of "Southern" rock. In that sense, Band of Horses are in the right hands with Johns at the board. He's not just familiar with the three-part Crosby, Stills and Nash harmonies that color the undulating, fingerpicked "Shut-in Tourist," the mellow "Horse With No Name" tones of "Dumpster World," and the bluegrass-inflections of the rather Dylanesque "Everything's Gonna Be Undone," he's basically on a first-name basis with all of them.

       Mirage Rock does its best to split the difference between grungy hard-rockers, like the softly searing "Feud," with its "I need you to fail" refrain, and the straight-up Bakersfield country discomfort of "Long Vows," a Gram Parsons-style ballad that begins with a "Hello Darlin'," and ends on a meaner note: "No one's gonna show you the way/When it gets cold/You can find yourself baby/Back in the hole from which you came/And everything will fall into place." If, at times, that makes for an album that's more an amalgam of styles than a coherent artistic statement, at least Mirage Rock has one thing holding it all together: an alluringly pensive moodiness bordering on both beauty and despair. As Bridwell, at his most unadorned, put it in "Heartbreak on the 101," "You leave me more damaged every day/You took my entire world and threw it all away."  

GIRL TALK INTERVIEW PREVIEW

LAPTOP POP

Gregg Gillis brings the mash-up mastery of Girl Talk to Charlottesville

By: MATT ASHARE |  

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.