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.
Continued
