Girl Talk: "All I feel is that I'm playing classics."

What is there left to say about Gregg Gillis? The one man-machine behind Girl Talk stepped up sampling to a new level with the release of All Day last summer, which quite literally soundtracked every party for nearly a year, so detailed and meticulous was its sampling and so inspired its song choice. Anyone can put a rap vocal over a house hook, but nobody chops and changes with the love and devotion of this Pittsburgh native. Gillis is not only a musical savant; he’s also incredibly well spoken and disarmingly intelligent. Spend twenty minutes with him and it feels like you’ve been burrowing down aural rabbit holes for a lifetime. We should know...

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TheVine: So I’ve been reading up about what you’ve been bringing to your stage shows in the past year or so, how does that change when you do festivals like Big Day Out?

Gregg Gillis: I think the big chance this year was not only bringing LED content, like lights and things like that, but even more than that was the orchestration of everything, which I never really did prior to this year. It used to be a free-for-all [Girl Talk’s shows are notorious for stage invasions that can last the entire set]. But now there’s choreography and lights, it’s sequenced rather than improvised. For instance, this is the first full year that I’ve toured with a lighting guy who knows my stuff inside-out. We’ve got people responsible for the physical props; the confetti and balloons and stuff like that, so you know, the festival ideally has the same mentality as my new club shows.

These particular shows we have been going back and forth on a design for the stage for Big Day Out. It’s still up in the air. It would be a new design for us, ideally it’d be the foundation for what I would tour with in the States in 2012.

Speaking of up in the air, I did hear something about Coachella or some festival where you wanted to bring a helicopter or something and then you realised you were playing inside a tent?

[Laughs] Right, right. Well what I really wanted was a jetpack, which I’ve never seen except for at Big Day Out in New Zealand two years ago. I remember seeing this guy flying through and that was kind of insane.

Oh my god, was he in a band?

No I don’t think so! I think he was just a guy or a performer. Everyone thought it was a missile or something and they all ran away, but it was some dude with a jetpack. Very bizarre.

Well it’s good that we’re inspiring you to do bigger and dumber things..

[Laughs] Yeah.

I did read that you gladwrap the shit out of your laptop because every one of your shows ends up with people in the stage, spilling beer and getting loose. Have you found a more sophisticated method of protecting your technology yet?

You know what, I’m surrounded by a lot of people who build things and engineer new ideas – I’m an engineer myself – and they have suggested more sophisticated methods of doing it, but I love the Glad Wrap. I’ve done it every show for the past 3 or 4 years so it’s definitely the only pre-show ritual I have. It takes me thirty minutes to do both computers and it’s a slow process and once I’ve wrapped them up I’m in the mode of ‘Let’s go’. When you use the scotch tape with it, it’s very customised, you know? I can’t imagine anything else doing a better job based on the attention I give to the detail.

Do you feel like you could branch off as a side project to Girl Talk in making the ultimate laptop cases?

Right, or maybe I just need to travel with other electronic performers and tape their stuff up before a show when I’m 50 years old and retired? I can hang around with young people and gladwrap their new computers.

I can just see the ad. Some punk smashing a laptop against a wall or throwing it underwater and you just rocking up with the holy glad wrap to save the day…

Yeah, like the ex-musician who becomes the guitar tech.

Exactly. Now my burning question is about your computers actually. I know you only use a few programs to chop up samples and whatever, but what I really want to know is how you organise all of it. Irrespective of putting into loops and samples, my iTunes library gives me the shits every day of the week…

Laughs. Well that is actually a big component of this project; cataloguing everything and coming up with a method by which to do that, especially because the process is so trial and error. I probably only use 10 to 20 per cent of the stuff I actually sample. There’s this huge database. It’s changed over the years; when I started I didn’t really need a catalogue because I knew where everything was going. There’s been a couple of different eras of organisation since then but the one I use now is that I categorise songs by the date which I first sampled them. So now there’s divisions based on albums; I sampled it before All Day, for All Day or after it.

I actually make a text document outlining major tempos. Every different BPM. But then I also organise it by category, like say, Melodies You Can’t Recognise, or Melodies That Are Very Recognisable, Sampled Beats vs. Oringinal Beats, Hi-Hats, Vocal Samples That Aren’t Lyrical or whatever. And they’re all based on the tempo. Literally once every two weeks I’ll go back through all the material I’m working on, sometimes it will take a whole day just to catalogue the stuff into that text document. The days I have to do that, I don’t enjoy that day very much!

So what’s the most random or obscure sample that you’ve been able to find that your audiences hook into?

It’s weird, because sometimes there’s things that I have tried out live and they’ve gotten little to no response, and then it’s something I’ve put on the album because I liked the way it sounded musically. And after the album comes out, then people come to shows and they all know it. So yeah, it’s not even that obscure, it’s that I have a really diverse audience range from very young to old. So you take, for instance, the song ‘Magic’ by Pilot -- it was a ‘70s hit here. If you’re not interested in ‘70s pop music you wouldn’t know [it]. But since I put it on Night Ripper pretty much every show the entire crowd sings along.

On the last record I sampled Supergrass’ ‘Alright.’ That song to me was one of the best ‘90s songs of all time. It was in the soundtrack to Clueless over here which is probably it’s main claim to fame in America. That’s another one that made it onto the last album, and you’ve got these kids who are 18 years old and have no context screaming their heads off to that sample.

It’s almost like you’re re-establishing a new context for them, which they might not have had to start with.

Absolutely. Everything I do I try and stay within the Top 40 world. I figure, these are all songs that you definitely could have heard somewhere, whether you were looking for it or not. It’s exciting for me. I don’t expect anyone listening to my music to have the same background as me or like the same things. It’s not necessary. I need people who don’t even like pop music to come to the shows and enjoy the way it’s recontextualised. Some of them are hearing it for the first time, which intrigues me, because all I feel is that I’m playing classics.

In that respect, do you feel like using hip-hop as a base has bridged that divide between old and new? I mean, it’s almost become that new gold standard for pop music over the last twenty years, hasn’t it?

Yeah, but also the history of hip-hop is based on sampling anything. That can be a drum lick or ‘90s rock or whatever. For me, I’ve always just envisaged myself as an imaginary hip-hop producer.

Definitely now, hip-hop simultaneously appeals to young kids who like Kanye and Jay-Z and forty year-olds who view these as classics. We’re coming up to a new generation where old people are going to have grown up listening to rap while it’s still young people’s music. So I can drop an acapella from Wiz Khalifa and the kids will love it but then I drop a Wu-Tang [Clan] sample and older heads might be into it but it doesn’t mean the young ones won’t appreciate it. Wu-Tang and those rappers are still relevant and still collaborating with rappers like Wiz Khalifa…

Finally, on that note, I watched this South by South West industry video where the subject was ‘Why Hasn’t Girl Talk Been Sued Yet?’ I don’t want to get into that legal stuff but what I did notice is that most of the panelists, particularly the ones who came to your defence, were hip-hop DJs and producers.

I feel almost more than anything my records are a nod to that era of hip-hop record, De La Soul, N.W.A kind of stuff. They were big collages. People forget about that now. It’s music to them but they’re very detailed and use little five-second samples and jump around. I love that, I’ve always been into that sound and in the hip-hop world they know that on every level, from sampling music to picking up lines. They’re very open to sharing with the mixtapes and everything. I think I took a lot of those ideas and ran with them in an extreme way. But I definitely feel 100% connected to that history.

Jonno Seidler