Gregg Gillis never meant to be the sensation he became when he started making music in his dorm room at Case Western Reserve University in Ohio.
"Success came as a surprise," said Gillis, now more commonly known as Girl Talk, in an interview with The Eagle. "I started Girl Talk when I started college and put out albums on a small scale. Music was never something I thought I'd live off of." Gillis will be performing in the Tavern this Saturday at 8 p.m. Tickets will be sold beforehand, starting at 6 p.m. in the University Club in Mary Graydon Center.
Signed to Illegal Art Records, a label infamous for its controversial use of sampling, Gillis has released four albums as Girl Talk and is now known as the sensation that, along with peers such as DJ Danger Mouse and Party Ben, is bringing remixes and mash-ups back into the mainstream. Remixes, which were once so rare and abstract, are now much more commonplace, due in part to the accessibility of mixing materials.
To Gillis, the rise of mash-ups is unsurprising.
"With any genre, things loom around the underground for a while," he said. "As a culture, we've become more receptive to recycling ideas. A lot of media content is generated off previously existing media."
As a mash-up artist, Gillis is not a traditional DJ. Artists like him never play songs unaltered. Rather they seek to create a manipulation or collage. Girl Talk's performances have spanned a number of different size venues, including festivals, clubs, college campuses and mid-size venues like the 9:30 club. Despite his varied experiences, Gillis does not have a preference in terms of his performance space. He explained that smaller venues provide a feel of intimacy and direct impact with the audience, but the energy and vastness of festivals and larger shows tends to transcend the need for intimacy altogether.
"I like chaos and I like structure and I like hanging out in the club," he said. "I always try to make a performance out of it. It's about approaching a certain level of communication in the audience."
This past winter, Gillis played shows at Pennsylvania State University and Harvard University, both of which ended in out-of-control audiences that caused damage to the respective venues. According to Gillis, most of his shows have gone off without a hitch, and unsuccessful shows have been the result of organizational issues. He does, however, admit that his background in underground performances results in a tendency toward bedlam.
"On an underground level," he said, "all you can do is push for the most insanity that can happen."
Gillis said a lot of people don't recognize how live his shows are. Although he mixes samples in a way that resembles the recorded versions of his songs, like a live band, the execution is always different. Gillis attributes this difference to improvisation resulting in live remixes.
Although some may not consider mash-ups to be a legitimate genre, Gillis said he is open to different perspectives on the issue.
"For me, the exciting thing is that you might not be able to define it," he said. "It's the act of getting people to rethink what music is and recontextualize what came before."
As music moves more toward abstraction and sampling continues to gain momentum, acts like Girl Talk will continue to flourish and grow, paying a new homage to their peers as well as musicians who came before them. "Everything you hear is essentially bits of other things from the past," Gillis said. "There's no reason you can't do that in the physical sense."
You can reach this writer at thescene@theeagleonline.com.
