NEWSLETTER

Photo by Ben Rayner

Samples. There are plenty of rotters out there dressing their shitty songs up in them, applying them as liberally as possible without realising everyone can see straight through their horribly stuck-together musical golems to their tiny, inverted, shrivel-dicked, barren, soulless cores. Those guys are the bad guys. Every once in a while though someone comes along and knits a whole load of little samples together to make a big cloak of amazingness which hides the disjointed nature of the music’s bloody birth. As Akufen did with millions of tiny edits in micro-house, so Gregg Gillis has done in the realm of sheer unabated, crystalline pop. His Girl Talk project began as a fairly experimental noise outfit using stolen bits from other people’s songs to add to the general manipulated effect, but three albums, well over 300 samples and not a single clearance later he has produced the record that displays his perfect pop vision—Night Ripper. Except that it’s lots of other people’s visions stuck together.

Vice: So, how good are you at talking to girls? Do you make like one of your songs and try on a load of different angles in a row and then just hope for the best?

Gregg Gillis: Erm, well, I used to be pretty mediocre. Below average, I’d say. Then I quit my job and that meant I could grow my hair, get a beard together and now things seem to be working out a load better.

What kind of job did you have where you had to have short hair and be clean shaven? Was it at a boot camp?

No, no. I am actually a trained biochemical engineer and I was working in a lab carrying out theoretical sleep research. It was pretty interesting actually. Basically, no one knows why the cradling or rocking motion causes the body to fall asleep. So we did loads and loads of tests on people. It was pretty Blade Runner in there at times. That was a nine-to-five, five-days-a-week job, though, and in the US you get ten days off a year max, so I was basically working, then disappearing every weekend to play in different cities. I took my whole year’s holiday off in like the first two months I was there.

Did the people you worked with know that you were going off on the weekends to get butt-naked on stage in front of strangers and press buttons that make Nirvana go a cappella over the Boredoms?

Nah, it was a Superman vibe. There with the short hair in the week and then just some lies and evasion and off I go on the weekends.

You have never cleared a sample and record for a label called Illegal Art but on this album you swiped the most famously sued song to sample another song ever: The Verve’s “Bittersweet Symphony”. Were you not scared that The Verve would find out and take out all the pain and anguish from the loss of millions of pounds at the hands of wrinkly Mick and walking zombie Keith on poor little old you in Pittsburgh?

Nah. We have something called Fair Use over here. Shame you guys don’t.

THE JZA
Girl Talk’s album Night Ripper is out on Illegal Art in February. myspace.com/girltalkmusic

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