He came here to rock the microphone — mix-master Gregg Gillis (a.k.a. Girl Talk) takes mash-ups to the next level with his infamously intense dance parties. Just don’t call him a DJ

DETAILS

Girl Talk w/ Holy Fuck
Warehouse Nightclub
Thursday, October 11 - Thursday, October 11

More in: Rock / Pop

Though he’s basking in the buzz generated from online message boards and popular YouTube clips, not to mention major appearances at Coachella 2007 and this year’s Festival International de Jazz de Montréal, mash-up maestro Girl Talk (Gregg Gillis) hasn’t had a chance to rest. He recently finished an exhaustive tour, criss-crossing the U.S. with his pals White Williams and Dan Deacon. Now, thanks to the online proliferation of his reputation for letting dancers join him onstage, Gillis has had to overcome a new set of challenges.

“It’s weird,” he says. “I’ve been playing live for a long time, but over the past year it’s become etiquette at every show to have people come up and dance on stage with me. It used to happen at only a few of the shows, but it’s become a standard part of the performance. I am now at the level where I inform the venue in advance. Now that so many kids expect it, we have to do it, if possible. Otherwise, they might just go for it anyway.”

With dozens of dancers surrounding him, one might think Gillis would play loose with his performances and let his laptop take care of the work. This is not the case. Throughout the show, projected images remind the crowd that Girl Talk is “not a DJ.” Rather than queuing up records, beat-matching and playing songs, as in the case of typical DJs, he has created a massive multi-track of countless loop-based vocal tracks, riffs, beats and synthesizers that he mixes and mashes together live with the click of a mouse.

“I have a set-list beforehand that I go through,” he says. “There is some freedom, but I don’t really want to improvise. I think people buy the records and see the shows to hear specific arrangements and compositions. I like to put a lot of time into knowing exactly what I’m going to play, rather than getting up there and looking like a circus trick. I don’t go up there with random samples and try to do something with it. The arrangements are well thought out.”

Though Gillis’s complicated arrangements might imply a traditional musical background, they actually come from a lifelong trial-and-error approach to making music. Up until about three month ago, Gillis was leading a double life as a biomedical engineer during the week, and performing as Girl Talk on the weekends. His detail-oriented engineering background heavily influences his musical style. Sample-based music is very meticulous – it requires spending many hours on minute details.

“My records started to pick up momentum about a year ago,” recalls Gillis. “I got a booking agent and he started booking shows every Friday and Saturday night — rarely taking the night off. That was fine at the beginning, and I was really enjoying the weekend getaways, but it just got to the point where I could not keep up with all the show offers. Since I never really intended for this to be a big-time thing, it was hard for me to even take a step back and realize, or trust in myself, that I could live off of it.

“All my friends thought I was insane for keeping the job for as long as I did. I was selling out shows every weekend and I was making more money on the weekend than I was in a month sitting in a cubicle. So, after awhile, I thought, I could at least do this for a year. If it ends after a year, I’ll move on, so I might as well go for it.”

Thankfully, Gillis’s jam-packed touring schedule includes a sample-based dance-a-thon at The Warehouse, and Calgarians can expect to hear mostly new material. Before putting a new album together, he road-tests his arrangements, letting the feedback from the audience guide the creation of the album — currently favouring recognizable samples over the abstract beat work that characterized his early releases. According to him, the day after his breakthrough album, Night Ripper, came out, he was already moving on to new mixes. With about a year and a half of steady touring under his belt, he has enough new material for an album. Now, he simply needs a month or so to piece it together. Though, judging from his hectic touring schedule, that doesn’t seem very likely.