Greg Gillis gained national recognition last year under the pseudonym Girl Talk for his unique mash-up compilation, Night Ripper.
Though mash-ups are generally considered little more than a novelty, Gillis brought some artistic legitimacy to the table by creatively mixing up to 30 samples into three-minute songs.
In anticipation of his forthcoming show here in Charlottesville, tableau recently caught up with Greg to ask him a few questions about his work.
tableau: How exactly do you decide what samples go well with each other? Your mixes seem very robust, but at the same time, it seems like it would be a very delicate process.
Greg Gillis: For me, it's never really intuitive -- it's always very trial-and-error based. I'm always isolating samples and not really worrying about what I'm going to do with them. I try out tons of different things. Every show, I change up small aspects of my songs and after a year or two of experimenting, certain things pop up and start to sound really good. It's a guessing game for me ... It's just whatever sounds good to my ears.
tableau: Since you use so many samples without permission of the artist, do you ever worry about the legality of what you're doing?
GG: With my other albums, I was really doing it on an underground level, so I wasn't that concerned. I think with the last record, with the attention I got, I had to be a little bit concerned. I don't feel morally wrong about anything I'm doing. I don't feel like I'm negatively impacting any artists. I feel like the work is transformative and stands on its own feet. There is a thing called 'fair use' in the United States law that allows you to sample without permission if it falls under certain criteria, and I do believe my music should fall within what would be fair use. So I worry about it, but at the same time, I feel good about it.
tableau: Would you consider yourself more of an artist, or more of a DJ? Your music has definitely received its fair share of critical acclaim, but at the same time, most of the people that I'm going to the concert with are just looking to dance.
GG: I don't know if I would pick either, as far as 'DJ' or 'artist.' I'd hate to call myself an artist, because then I just sound like a pretentious dude. But I would definitely not consider myself a DJ, not in a traditional sense. For me, a DJ is somebody who mixes songs, and there's a specific art to that. But when I perform live, people don't come out to hear me play songs, they come out to hear me remix and make new songs out of that. I've seen other sound-collage artists do [that], where you get up there and you manipulate samples to make something new, but when I see DJs play, even the most creative ones will queue up a track and can step away and let it play out. With me, any change in the music I'm actually doing by hand. I've always kind of considered myself an electronic music producer that happens to be based in samples.
tableau: Looking into the future, have you got any ideas for your next album yet?
GG: Like I said before, I really like to preview new material all the time. When I'm a performer, I'm showing about 80 percent new material, so I think I have a lot built up [over] the past year and a half or so. I think I should be able to pump out another album within a year. I think it will be in a similar style to Night Ripper, but I've worked on music more this year than any other period of my life, so I think I can put something together that's a bit more cohesive and tighter than Night Ripper. I think I may have found my niche with that particular style, and I haven't really heard anyone else view music in that style, so I'm going to try and put out another album before people start jumping on the bandwagon.
Girl Talk performs tonight at the Satellite Ballroom with Dan Deacon and White Williams. Doors open at 8 p.m.
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