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.

THE BLACK KEYS

The Black Keys move beyond blooze with El Camino

by Matt Ashare

The Black Keys outdo themselves on the new El Camino

It was far, far too easy when the Black Keys emerged in 2002 to see the duo as essentially the flip side to the stripped-down blues-inflected rawk the White Stripes had by then already coined and, well, begun making a mint out of. Jack and Meg White came from the terminally recessed Motor City; Keys' guitarist Dan Auerbach and drummer Patrick Carney spent their teens in the industrial wasteland of Akron, Ohio, a city best know for supplying Detroit auto manufacturers with, ah, tires. It was a parallel too perfect to pass up; as the good folks at GM might have said, "If the steel-belted radial fits, drive it."

       But locked in the bloozy grooves of the Black Keys' first three rapidly released albums — 2002's The Big Come Up, 2003's Thickfreakness, and 2004's Rubber Factory — was an inconvenient truth that had nothing to do with carbon emissions. To keep the automotive metaphor alive for one more line, the gutbucket Black Keys were clearly driving on a different highway to hell than the schticky, if somewhat more colorful, White Stripes. If the Whites were building up to the spectacle of epic Jimmy Page guitar heroics, the Blacks, for all their grounding in the same Mississippi Delta mud that Zeppelin took off from, also had at least one foot firmly planted in the garage where amped-up ’60s psychedelia was fashioned from spare parts left over from the original British Invasion.

The Black Keys, El Camino (Nonesuch)

       Okay, so maybe that's a bit of an oversimplification. But I ain't hating on the White Stripes, so cut me some slack. Besides, along with the blues standard "Leavin' Trunk," the Black Keys actually covered one of my favorite Beatles tunes, "She Said, She Said," on The Big Come Up. Seriously, check it out. And they paid tribute to twisted Seattle garage-punks the Sonics with a wigged-out, fuzztoned version of their take on the Richard Berry classic "Have Love, Will Travel" on Thickfreakness. And. . . well, you get the point, right? I know, I know, they've also made a habit out of doing tunes by the late, great Mississippi bluesman Junior Kimbrough, but I'm pretty sure that just proves my point. As for Jack White: he had to start a whole other band, the Raconteurs, when he got the itch to play popmeister.

       Still not hating on the Stripes. But, while Jack's been playing producerman in Nashville and popping up from time to time on projects like this year's Danger Mouse-helmed faux soundtrack album Rome, Auerbach and Carney have just kept trucking along, artfully adding new sonic twists to their well-worn bag of tricks at every stop along the way. The latest, the new El Camino, was recorded after the duo relocated to Nashville, and, it's the second they've produced in collaboration with a DJ mashup master turned analog audiophile who goes by the name of Danger Mouse.

       It's almost as if, for some perverse purpose, they've embraced the whole White/Black narrative. But that's beside the point because, as ridiculous as it might be to insist that El Camino represents a major artistic breakthrough for the Black Keys — particularly after the multiple Grammy-winning breakthrough of last year's "Brothers" — that's exactly where I'm headed here. Brothers, for all its trippy trappings, found the band self-consciously revisiting their r&b roots on a road trip to Muscle Shoals. With Danger Mouse back on board, El Camino distills the very best of what's bluesy about the Black Keys, and then builds on that with plenty of keyboards by one B. Burton (a/k/a Danger Mouse), thumping basslines, a trio of female background singers, and I swear I hear some vintage E Street Band glockenspiel behind the massed vocals, chainsaw guitar, and the muscular drums of the shuffling first single, "Lonely Boy," and the raw, melodic surge of "Dead and Gone." 

       It's a bit like Auerbach, Carney, and Burton have found their way to Phil Spector's legendary "wall of sound" without sacrificing any of the grit that's defined the Black Keys since their inception. "Gold on the Ceiling" takes a riff that ZZ Top would be proud to call their own, delivers it with a little T-Rex glam swagger, and outfits it with a soulful if somewhat nonsensical chorus ("Gold on the ceiling/I ain't blind/It's just a matter of time/Before you steal it/It's alright/Ain't guarding my high"). Auerbach, who tends to go for cadence over depth when it comes to lyrics, opens "Little Black Submarine" (it's about a girl, not a boat, or maybe just a sly nod in the general direction of the Beatles) accompanying himself with a fingerpicked acoustic figure that carries just a whisper of "Stairway to Heaven," before the track begins its slow build to full-on blooze-rock bliss, replete with hammering Bonham drums and big, burly powerchords. Auerbach may even be channeling Jimmy Page in the outro solo, but he does so with a certain raw subtlety.

       Ultimately, what distinguishes El Camino is the adventurous attitude the Black Keys bring to making what, at essence, is simply really great, unpretentious rock and roll. Nothing more, and nothing less. They're rootsy without being reverent, fun without being flippant, and they achieve a certain heaviness without resorting to hard-rock cliche. That may not seem like much. But there just aren't many bands you can say that about.