Girl Talk talks with The Lafayette, discusses music and live show

Prior to interviewing electronica musician Girl Talk, Arts and Entertainment editor Eric Wilson and I called Girl Talk's manager to ensure some last minute details. While speaking with him, we were presented with an odd request. Girl Talk and his roadies asked for two 30-racks of Bud Light in a can. On Wednesday April 29, the LAF hosted their annual Spring Concert Series. The line-up included hip-hop group Code Red, hip-hop violin duo Black Violin, and experimental electronic music artist Girl Talk.

Girl Talk, also known as Gregg Gillis, is a Pittsburgh native who rose to fame with his off-kilter electronic music. Using almost entirely all samples of songs from artists ranging from UGK to Sinead O'Conner, Gillis is known for his highly kinetic live shows, which are performed entirely with a laptop. He has released four full length LPs, most recent 2008's Feed the Animals.

Yet Gillis is no stranger to the music scene. Since his days of studying biomedical engineering at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, Gillis has been making and performing music with his computer.

"I got a laptop to go to college, but that was really for academic purposes," said Gillis. "I had seen a lot of musicians play on computers, and a lot of my favorite experimental producers were doing stuff with live computer-based performance. When I got a computer, it seemed very much like I had gotten a guitar or something, so right from there I knew I was going to do a project with it and just play out with it."

Yet Gillis is not the first individual to dabble with computer instrumentation. Gillis spent much of his later youth attending performances of similar electronica artists who pioneered the laptop as a musical instrument. Yet unlike his own idols, Gillis has managed to expand the genre to a considerably wider fan base.

"It's a funny thing where this whole project has gone, because a lot of the people I looked up to, when I got involved in this, were people playing a lot smaller shows," noted Gillis. "To me, the ultimate goal back in the day was to be able to travel city to city and play [for] 20 or 30 different people, and in the past few years, it's gotten way beyond that and it's a lot larger shows."

Many naysayers disregard Gillis for his use of a computer to construct his music, arguing that because the laptop isn't a "real" instrument. Yet Gillis sees the computer in a completely different light.

"I think you [can] make music on it, so it's an instrument," said Gillis. "For me, a lot of my favorite musicians growing up were people who did music on a computer, and the world I come from, it was never really involved in a more traditional DJ rule.There's a way to perform music live, cueing up samples, cutting it up, filtering, things like that. So in my world, it wasn't even a theory, like 'Is [the computer] an instrument or not?' it was like, it clearly is because I'm going to see a lot of my favorite performers perform with it."

Gillis later added, "I think with any music, you could say, 'Anyone can study guitar for 20 years and become a great guitar player. Anyone can rap into a microphone, any one can play the drums.' It's kind of like that argument seems silly to me, but you definitely hear it. I think it's exciting when you're making records that stir up conversation like that."

Another concern people have about Gillis' music is that his live show is not really a show in the slightest. Far from being just a keyboard jockey paying a CD for an audience, Gillis broke down his live set and how demanding the process of sampling truly is for an artist like him.

"I use a program called Audio Mulch, and when you open it up, it's kind of a blank program. From there, it's not complicated. It's just kind of like you build up your own applications and how you want to organize it. It's the sort of thing where the performance for me, what's actually happening, there's hundreds of loops running consistently, and every time you hear a change, it's actually me clicking the mouse and actually dropping that sample...I kind of keep count in my head and mix and match those on the fly."

Later, he added, "If you had seen me every night on this tour, I might go through similar source material night to night to night, because it takes me a long time to build this stuff up, but when actual samples drop would be different in a subtle way. Maybe a hi-hat would come in here a kick drum would come in here, so it's very much in real time."



with reporting by Eric Wilson and Sean Ryon