Gregg Gillis discusses the creation of a personal genre

Chloe McConnell Arts Editor

On Feb. 11, The Miscellany News spoke to Gregg Gillis of Girl Talk in a telephone interview, discussing the process and results of creating sampled-based music.

The Miscellany News: Which musicians inspired you to start sampling and mixing?

Gregg Gillis: I was really into some dudes from the more experimental world, like John Oswald who did a lot of collage in the ’70s and ’80s. Also, a band called Negativand that I was really into. One band that got me completely psyched about using a computer to make music was Kid 606, who kind of blew my mind and I just wanted to do stuff like that.

MN: How does your process work, do you know right away that you want to work with a song when you hear it, or does inspiration come later?

GG: I’ve sampled so many things. I take a song into a sound editor and isolate a specific part and quantify it and make sure that it falls under a specific time structure. I do that to so many songs that I hear, any song that I like or instrumentation part. Anything that jumps out at me, I sample it at the time, and then I put it in the computer and catalogue it. Only one-tenth of that material actually gets used. It’s a big trial and error process for me. When I hear something, I never know the context in which I’ll use it.

MN: Is it natural for you to create assonance between songs that are generally considered dissonant?

GG: I don’t know, I really don’t feel like it’s that natural. I feel that once I hear it in the proper context, it strikes me. I don’t think it’s right or wrong. I don’t have any formidable training in music and I don’t have a particular ear for hearing when things are in tune or out of tune. So, it’s natural in terms of what I want to hear. Whether other people are down with it, I don’t really know and I try not to be concerned about that. I’m ready to play whatever I think sounds cool.

MN: Do you feel that by mixing this music together, your songs take on an entity of their own, or do you still feel that they are strongly connected to the original songs?

GG: I feel like it is connected to the original song, but I feel that it can become its own entity. I think that goes for any form of music. If you turn on the radio right now to [any] station, you’ll hear something and you’ll be able to almost recognize what they were listening to when they made it. People’s influences are usually pretty obvious; I don’t feel like there are many truly original ideas happening. So, I think that I’m kind of following along with that, just in a more physical manner. I feel that the end goal for me is to make something that will become it’s own entity and people will view it as a Girl Talk song. But, at the same time, that they can completely recognize the source.

MN: Do you think that through the mash-ups you are making musical styles more accessible to wider audiences?

GG: I definitely understand that people react very differently to the music, some people love the source material and that’s why they are into it, and that’s the way that I do it. Other people come up to me and say that they hate indie rock, and they only listen to hip-hop, but they like the album, or that they never listen to rap music, but they like the album. That’s cool to me, that speaks to the idea that it does have legs of stone. When they hear the song it is not necessarily in any particular genre, it’s a new piece of music. My parents listen to it and they don’t listen to much contemporary rap music.

MN: Through the process of collage, does your personality lend itself to the music you create?

GG: Yeah, to some degree. I don’t think that the lyrical content necessarily reflects me entirely accurately. All the stuff on the record is my record collection, that’s what I listen to. So, in that regard, a lot of stuff on the album is personal to me, in terms of that these are my favorite songs from my youth or a particular period, or this experience. So, the albums to me are like a weird diary.

MN: So, do you have an emotional connection to the songs that you sample from in some way?

GG: Yeah, not every one as much as the other, they are not all sentimentally attached. But, I like every song I use and I’ve heard them all in a particular scenario and a lot of them I have listened to for many years growing up. There definitely is an emotional connection with it. For me it’s part of the appeal of doing it; manipulating emotional connections or really messing with ideas and standard notions of pop.

MN: The originality of your performances is widely talked about. What can Vassar Students expect on Feb. 15?

GG: I come to the table with a similar energy most nights, and I adapt to what the audience is doing. The show for me is very interactive, if people want to sit back and watch then I’m happy to put on a very physical performance and be visually entertaining, and if people want to party and dance then I’m very happy to roll with that; I like to conduct the party.

I come to the shows with the same mentality, but every show is different depending upon how people are reacting to it. It’s not like I can get up there and go through the motions of playing an instrument, I really have to interact with the audience and push for a fun evening regardless for what they are in the mood for.

To read the complete interview with Gregg Gillis, please visit misc.vassar.edu.