Photo by Bao Nguyen

Interview by Chase Turner 

I got to sit down with Greg Gillis aka Girl Talk before his sold out show at First Avenue on Monday. When I got on the tour bus he was saran wrapping his laptop in preparation for the show. There were vitamin supplements and discarded odwalla juice containers all over the place, apparently everyone on the tour was sick, you’d never know it from the show. We talked about his live show, his album creation process, and those Microsoft “I am a PC” commercials. 
 

More Cowbell: You use audio mulch to create your live shows, it’s a looping program, right? 

Greg Gillis: When you open it up it’s blank, you can use it in a variety of ways. I think its primary use and how I got into it is signal processing, if you were to run a song through it, or run a guitar through it, it does really nice real time processing. You can go crazy with it. In the early days, in the early stuff I was doing was primarily taking a pop song and digitally manipulating it, tearing it up, so that’s what I used the program for. From there, there are a bunch of different applications and there is a loop player on it. The setup I designed way back when was a way to do live  

More Cowbell: How much versatility does that give you during your shows? 

GG: For me, and the amount of samples I have, there’s a ton of stuff I’m able to do, but don’t try to do. Doing a collage in real time takes up all my attention, you could hear a drum beat, that could be five distinct loops that I’m triggering on and off. You can do tons of stuff, you can cut up samples in real time, but my stuff is so quick moving through samples that I try not to do much beyond triggering samples because it slows down the music. 

More Cowbell: It seems like you stick to a pretty consistent live show. 

GG: Yeah, every night, even if I try to go through the same source material, I can’t re-create the same show, everything’s so distinct. Every show where I get some free time I’ll try and work on some pieces. To me, the live show is one piece of music that is constantly, slowly evolving. It’s the same template, including certain things, taking away certain other things. I’ve done the same thing many nights, but how I go about it, the transition elements, that varies night to night. I’m constantly working on stuff to introduce to live shows; I played at this spot about a year ago, so the set will be about 100% different.  

More Cowbell: You’re playing 1^st ave tonight, do you incorporate a prince song in your set? 

GG: I know CX is, one of the openers is jamming a prince tune, I’m pumped to see his rendition. Certain times I’ll do it, sometimes I won’t. Today I was planning on doing that but I ran out of time [editor’s note: bummer!].  

More Cowbell: Most electronic musicians use macs, you use a PC, is there any sort of preference, is that solely because of audio mulch, do you identify as a PC user? 

GG: I got my first laptop in college. They told me you have to buy a laptop in order to graduate from the university, so I believed them and bought one. It was a PC just because that was what I used when I was growing up. I’d seen people playing shows using computers multiple times and I knew I wanted to use it as a music making tool as well. It’s kind of what I faded into, and after a certain number of times playing shows with audio mulch, at this point I’d have a hard time switching, having enough confidence to go and play a show using something else. Once you’ve put in a couple hundred shows it’s like, well… 

More Cowbell: You’re pretty comfortable with that. 

GG: Yeah. 

More Cowbell: Did I see you in the recent Microsoft “I’m a PC” ad? I swear I saw it on TV, but when I went on the internet to try and find it I couldn’t.  

GG: It’s hard to find, we were trying to show it to a bunch of friends, we could not find it. 

More Cowbell: I couldn’t find it on youtube. 

GG: Yeah, there’s a banner ad that’s online and it’s slightly different from the TV version. The version I’m in mainly airs on comedy central, I saw it a couple of times. They reached out to do it and I thought it was cool, they were looking for people that specifically use PCs so I figured I’d do it for them. 

More Cowbell: Moving from your live show to your process of making an album. For me, I sort of have to re-contextualize your music the first few times I hear it. When you’re starting out a track, are you building from scratch, are you starting with one element and building from there, or do you have a general idea of how all the parts will come together? 

GG: My work process is always try to work on something for the live show. Once it works from there, I just work on the live show for like two years, and eventually I’ll have enough material where I can say, okay I’ve got enough material to make an album. So when I sit down to make an album, with Feed the Animals for instance, I knew where it was going to begin and end. The Spencer Davis Group, Roy Orbison drums, and UGK vocals that start the album, I knew that was going to exist. Tag Team with Big Country, I knew that was going to exist. There were so many parts I knew would exist and I knew where they would fall in line. It’s based on the live show, so it’s not like I sit down one day and say, I have this sample so I’m going to just start working on it. I try out small things all the time with the live show and the structure generally starts to take shape. If I have an idea of Tag Team and Big Country I’ll throw it smack dap in the middle of the set, and then I’ll look at the reaction. Maybe it came too early, people get really excited at that, maybe I want to push it back a little bit, or maybe the drums didn’t feel right, I need drums that segue from this part into that part. There are always small details, I’m constantly shifting elements around for the live show. When it’s time to do the album there’s no pressure to come up with ideas, cause most of the path I’m going to take has already been thought out. 

More Cowbell: You’re really playing off the crowd in the live show. 

GG: Yeah, it’s kind of a combination, I’m down with certain things and I want to respond to myself. Other times it’s impossible to deny the crowd, how much they get into something. 

[At this point Gregg’s buddy interjected to let him know the score of the Steelers game, they talked about it for a few minutes.] 

More Cowbell: We were talking about re-contextualizing tracks, and for me, one of the cool experiences I get out of what you do, I don’t always like everything you’re pulling together in terms of the source material, but I end up liking it in the end after a few listens. Do you like all the material you’re using? 

GG: I’m down with everything I sample, but I understand that attitude. To me that’s one of the best compliments I can receive. I mean, I’m a fan of everything and I like to reference things in a way that you can hear them and understand them and relate to it in a way that you understood that song previously, but ideally I want to make something that’s transformative, that becomes something new. When someone comes up to me and says, “I hate everything on there, but I really like the way it sounds, I like what you did to it,” and I think great, that probably means that it’s not just me playing the sample, but creating something new, which is definitely the ultimate goal. What I’m doing is far removed from just trying to present something, I’m trying to re-contextualize it. 

More Cowbell: When you do sample tracks, how do you separate instrumentation and vocals so well. I know for a lot of the hip hop and rap tracks you can use acapella stuff. 

GG: I’d say 95% of the vocals I use exist in acapella form. Other things like Styx or Sly and the Family Stone, are just songs where they have isolated vocal parts or vocal parts with just drums, so I rarely filter a song, occasionally I do it, there are various ways on Adobe Audition and other song editors to filter out the instruments, but usually the quality is lacking in a way that I don’t want to use it. I want everything to sound 100%, I won’t play something if I can hear a little click of the melody in the background. 

More Cowbell: Have you gotten any feedback from any of the artists you sample? 

GG: Yeah. I heard back from one of the ladies in Yo Majesty, I used their vocals in the last album. Big Boi from Outkast came out to a show of mine in Atlanta. That was an honor, that was the coolest thing. Sophie B. Hawkins’ manager called me and wants me to collaborate with her. Recently I had a songwriter for Donnie Iris, kind of this Pittsburgh legend, this songwriter also works as an intellectual property lawyer at Case Western, where I went. He hit me up and told me he likes the music and it’s legally relevant, it should be completely legal. A rare case of someone on both sides of the coin.