Girl Talk
Sat., March 7, Club Firestone, Orlando, $15 in advance/$18 dos, clubfirestone.com
One of the hottest DJs on the scene right now isn’t really a DJ at all. Girl Talk — the stage name and dance-music project of 27-year-old Pittsburgh native Gregg Gillis — is more an electronic music phenomenon than anything else. His fourth album, 2008’s Feed the Animals, impressed all-manner of respected music pundits despite being almost entirely composed of several hundred samples from other artists’ songs.
Gillis is among the fast-rising faction of laptop rockers. He calls what he does “pop song re-contextualizations,” which are like mash-ups, but with no less than 15 song samples in any given track. But you won’t find him digging in hole-in-the-wall records stores, rifling through dusty bins or awaiting the latest shipment of retro European LPs. In fact, obscurity is the one thing he tries to avoid.
“To me, the gold mine is the radio,” Gillis said in a phone interview a few weeks ago, during a between-show break. “You turn it on and ideally, you discover songs that people are familiar with and you make something new of them.”
Gillis is looking for music that makes an emotional connection, those Top 40 pop songs that imprinted themselves on our psyches in our formative years and have hung around in our gray matter ever since.
This article appears in Mar 4-10, 2009.
