Short Biography
Gregg Gillisʼ alter ego, GIRL TALK will get the party started when he hits power on his two
glad-wrap-covered laptops for his fifth Australian jaunt to play Big Day Out 2012. Girl Talk will also treat
Sydney and Melbourne to a dance off at headline sideshows at the Enmore Theatre, Sydney on Saturday,
January 28 and the Palace Theatre, Melbourne on Tuesday, January 31.
Mash-up maestro Girl Talk has clocked up more than a decade of sample-obsessed production and
relentless touring across five albums. Channelling the spirit of a house party, live audiences become a
mass of sweaty bodies dancing as though they are in their living room, and nobody is watching. ...
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Short Biography
Gregg Gillisʼ alter ego, GIRL TALK will get the party started when he hits power on his two
glad-wrap-covered laptops for his fifth Australian jaunt to play Big Day Out 2012. Girl Talk will also treat
Sydney and Melbourne to a dance off at headline sideshows at the Enmore Theatre, Sydney on Saturday,
January 28 and the Palace Theatre, Melbourne on Tuesday, January 31.
Mash-up maestro Girl Talk has clocked up more than a decade of sample-obsessed production and
relentless touring across five albums. Channelling the spirit of a house party, live audiences become a
mass of sweaty bodies dancing as though they are in their living room, and nobody is watching. After
playing 150 shows in one year, Girl Talk earned himself the reputation as the ultimate party starter.
"His seamlessly mixed set grabbed the entirety of popular music by the neck and shoved its tongue
down its throat."
LA Times, March 2011
"This will go down as one of the parties of the year... Girl Talk bring[s] an incredibly danceable mix of
music from a wide range of eras and genres."
Fasterlouder, January 2010
Recent release "All Day" landed critical acclaim for Girl Talk. Following on from his two previous albums,
"Night Ripper" and "Feed The Animals", it showcases Girl Talkʼs complex "pop collage" style with his
signature mix of current smashes, hip-hop, 80ʼs pop, 90ʼs alternative, and classic rock. Featuring large
catalogues of both blatantly appropriated melodies and blasts of unrecognizable fragments, "All Day"
clocks in at 71 minutes and 373 samples. All Day is available for free download here,
http://illegal-art.net/allday/.
Donʼt miss the Girl Talk antics. Tickets to Sydney and Melbourne shows are on sale noon, Monday 28
November.
In-depth Biography
Girl Talk is the pseudonym of DJ and remixer Greg Gillis. A Pittsburgh native who works as a biomedical research engineer during the day, Gillis channels his other creative energies into Girl Talk, whose sample-based dance tracks have made him the John Oswald or Christian Marclay of the mash-up generation: each of his songs are built on recognizable samples of recent hit singles, recontextualized into an entirely new piece. Not just a geeky studio boffin, Gillis is also a manic, intense live performer known for his high-speed exhortations into the mic and tendency to strip to his underwear on-stage while dancing circles around his laptop and DJ setup. At first a teenage punk performer inspired by Japanese noise acts like Merzbow and the Boredoms, Gillis made the surprisingly slight conceptual shift into copyright-flouting sample work around the turn of the millennium. Hooking up with the proudly anti-copyright collective Illegal Art, a shadowy label vaguely connected to the pioneering samplers Negativland, Gillis made his CD debut with 2002's Secret Diary, an artsy and largely conceptual release that turned the recognizable snippets into brief blasts of glitchy noise. 2004's Unstoppable was far more direct, using fewer and longer samples to create more recognizable mash-ups in the manner of early KLF singles, making Girl Talk suddenly by far the most pop-oriented and accessible project on the Illegal Art roster. After a pair of vinyl EPs, 2004's Stop Cleveland Hate and 2006's Bone Hard Zaggin', Gillis' third album as Girl Talk, 2006's Night Ripper, split the difference between his two previous full-length efforts, with the playfully recognizable samples of the second and the more complex structures of the first. ~ Stewart Mason, Rovi
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