 "Photo: Matthew Harrison/Collegian Staff")
Gregg Gillis lunges at his laptop while his stage name – Girl Talk – swirls into a vortex on the screen behind him. The words “we ready” repeat in a poppy cheer booming through his speakers. Purple hoodie-clad Gillis leaped into the crowd. A playful smirk swept his face as he got back on stage only to jump into the crowd a second time – assuring the crowd he’s going to fill them with as much energy as they can handle.
Not even ten minutes into the hard-not-to-dance-to set, Gillis took off his hoodie and ripped his undershirt to pieces. At that point the crowd was as covered in confetti as he was in his own sweat. The stage suddenly filled with randomly chosen fans who were willing to shake it. Two masked and colorful figures also emerged from backstage, armed with toilet paper guns to shoot out at the audience.
Hands became an ocean out of rhythm. To fight what could have easily caused sea sickness from staring into the crowd, Gillis danced harder than anyone else there. He ceased to stop moving – all the while fingering his laptop keys.
Sandwiched between All Time Low’s pop-rock set and Lupe Fiasco’s hip-hop performance, Gillis was doing something similar, yet very different. He played live music remixed from preexisting music. Using a program called “AudioMultch,” Gillis was gardening music in real time.
In an interview, he explained what everyone seemed to be asking: What is he doing up there?
“The way I actually perform is all live sample triggering. In the course of an hour performance, I might go through three or four hundred different loops,” Gillis said.
“I try to have all of the elements as isolated as possible,” he continued. “So when you hear drums playing, it might just sound like a drum loop, but it could be one kick drum sample then a hand clap sample then a high-hat sample. It could all be isolated. It’s like every two seconds I’m actually triggering samples by hand stringing it, kicking things in and out.”
“The show is a bit more free formed. It’s a bit more experimental. It’s not as specific. The records are something that I really sit down and spend a lot of time on every second and piece everything together perfectly, whereas the show has a bit of a more experimental, improvisational edge to it.”
Most of the samples that he looped through the set were the same samples that he’s been working with on his four albums.
“In using samples that I use on the albums, I like to spell it out there for people how live it is. When you hear stuff from the record, I like it to be a slightly new take. Maybe the drums will come in at a different time, or the vocals will come in differently or I’ll repeat something a certain number of times or blend a familiar vocal line from an album with a different melody. So, every show I’m working on new stuff. I could probably go out there and do an entire show of new material, but I think a lot of people are familiar with the past two albums so I like to do reinterpretations of a lot of material,” Gillis said.
He explained that laptop music directly correlates to live music. When fans come to a show, they want to hear their favorite song. Gillis is able to accommodate fans by playing their favorite song from his albums – in a new, transformative way.
Not only is his music easily converted from album to stage, but also from small to large venues. In UMass’
“I’m down for anything. I like playing tiny shows and big shows,” Gillis said.
“At UMass, I just sound checked and didn’t really know how many people were going to be there until I got onstage. I’ve played a lot of college shows, but I think this was potentially the biggest.”
For an artist that is used to playing smaller venues, this could possibly violate the intimacy that a smaller crowd harnesses. But could bigger mean better?
“I’ve played so many shows with smaller audiences over the years,” Gillis said.
“I feel like that’s kind of the heart of the project to play these small, tiny shows – intimate affairs, but I’ve just learned over the past few years playing larger shows can be really amazing. The bigger shows don’t need that level of intimacy to … be something else, especially with kind of celebratory music, dance music, club music that people sing along to, with thousands of people there; it’s going to be a magical experience.”
Better isn’t always the case, but different definitely is.
“I don’t think one’s better than the other. It can go really well either way. The show at UMass – it can be something much more massive and amazing if it goes down correctly. For me it’s almost comical playing at a stadium. It’s nice people can watch the show from different angles. Sometimes at a festival depending on the layout and the larger shows, the people in the far, far back don’t really have any angle to actually see anything. So for the people in the stadium seating it’s kind of nice that they can get a glimpse of something,” Gillis said.
The best part of the shows for the crowd and for Gillis is the “free for all” atmosphere. At smaller shows, he asks that the barricades be taken down so people can jump on stage. Though such magical mayhem cannot be accommodated at UMass, Gillis tries to get as many people as he can on stage. The back line was geared up with Lupe’s equipment, leaving less room for booty-dropping bodies, but still providing the rave vibe that Gillis loves.
Also adding to the vibe, Gillis’ best friend and real time VJ, Andrew Strasser, was part of the set. The screen behind Gillis and his dancing accompaniment burst with colorful images of remixed pop-culture images. Strasser has done all of Gillis’ album artwork over the years, as well as his promotional photos.
“It’s fun to create your own narrative based on this music that’s based on other people’s material,” said Gillis of the VJ element of his live shows. “A lot of the images Andrew works with play upon familiar themes without actually using images of the people I sample. So, something like a marijuana leaf or a basketball or a skull or whatever, to me, they’re all very pop culture, iconic imagery.”
There seemed to be a lot of symbolism: from a montage of bricks, Benjamins and fireworks, to a collage of bricks, laptops and mics. There were stacks of cheeseburgers with french fries exploding in the background (symbolic, of course, of the deliciously nutritious road-food that Gillis sweat out on stage) – and even a skull with jack-o-lanterns coming out of its nose and eye cavities while biting down on a 100 dollar bill with Ben Franklin’s face whited out while fireworks light up the sky behind it.
“It fun – with the artwork as well – to create a narrative where it doesn’t exist. You can create any story line you want. I think it’s fun to play with darker imagery when playing such upbeat, positive pop music. With the flames and even the album artwork for the last album (Feed the Animals) and that’s why I have the toilet paper gunners wear masks.”
Gillis is from the laptop music world – one he considers himself born out of. “The people I grew up looking up to in this music world were other laptop artists or other garage artists. People like John Oswald, Kid606, Negativland. It’s comical to me that a lot of people just didn’t know that world of influence and automatically associated me with a DJ … They don’t know what to do with me I guess,” Gillis said.
Mainstream culture doesn’t quite know what to do with laptop music in general, but it’s definitely breaking out. “Twenty years ago people couldn’t imagine what has become popular and mainstream now. Using a computer and using previously existing material has existed a long time, but is becoming very common now. So, I’m excited to see where it goes,” Gillis said.
“For me, it’s very exciting to be part of these big shows and all the shows and festivals and things like that. Just the fact that for your Spring Concert 2009 one of the artists was a guy playing a laptop. Therefore, that goes on to influence other people there to make their own beats, do their own mashups, whatever,” he added.
What drew Gillis into computer music and electronic music was exactly that – people can just pick it up. “One of the reasons I got involved with it in the first place, was just because you don’t need traditional musical training. You can express ideas and be creative and do things outside of the box just because its software and you can learn it on your own and make up your own rules. I think when you look at innovative artists over the years, it’s not really about a traditional talent level always. If more and more people make things, the more it will become innovative.”
So, 20 years from now maybe we’ll have a pop-culture icon with a computer for an instrument. Gillis predicts that “there’s gonna be some kid messing around with a computer, who is 10 years old, who in six years could potentially be winning a music award on MTV for the album they made.” Luckily, while we’re waiting for him to emerge into the scene, we still have Girl Talk to “bounce that.”
Leigh Greaney can be reached at lgreaney@student.umass.edu.
