Mashup maestro Girl Talk is the Jimi Hendrix of laptops

NERD UP! Engineer turned DJ Girl Talk works his cut-and-paste magic

What do freestyle phenom Lil Wayne, lite FM staple Chicago, and alleged ludehead Paula Abdul have in common? They're all featured on a super-hot single track by sample-savant Girl Talk. In the past 12 months, the 27-year-old beat master, born Gregg Gillis, has seen his album Night Ripper—composed of hundreds of highly recognizable pop snippets—blow up; posed for Playgirl; and been name-dropped on the floor of Congress. We caught up with him on the eve of his first national tour.

So, you finally left your day job.
Yeah, I took off three months ago. I was an engineer at a biomedical company. While I was working there, no one knew a thing about my side gig, and once I got big, it seemed too late to say anything. They thought I was this buttoned-up guy and I didn't want to tell them, "I actually spend my nights onstage in front of crowds, playing my laptop with my shirt off." I'd fly out for gigs on Friday nights and come back Sunday because I only had 12 vacation days for the whole year.

Sounds rough. Why didn't you ditch the job earlier?
I don't have any traditional musical ability, so I never really thought about doing music in a career-minded way. I still don't. This is gonna be a cool year for me, but if I have to go back to engineering after this, so be it.

Your gigs get pretty rowdy. What's your most memorable one?
I actually played a prom in San Francisco—it was at this awesome public school that made "Girl Talk Prom" T-shirts. I didn't go to my own prom, so it was particularly fun. I wore my one good wedding suit.

Photos courtesy of NickyDigital.com

CRAZY TALK Greg Gillis tastes the confetti in a New York club

How do you prepare for shows?
It's pretty labor-intensive. I have all these samples lined up—each of which takes about two hours to make—that I might drop for, like, 15 seconds apiece. I like to mix up genres and eras; I never want to do just a '90s set. But what I play onstage is usually just a 50th of the samples I have in my library.

How do you decide which of all those samples to use?
Sometimes I sample things and they won't find their way into a song for three years. Before Night Ripper, I never incorporated famous drum breaks; everything I used was obscure. Now I tend to go for more blatant stuff. It's more of a challenge to recontextualize the same played-out James Brown loop everyone else has used. I like to play things people thought they were tired of hearing.

What are you into besides music?
I can't stop talking about this Eddie Griffin movie, Irish Jam, about a hip-hop guy who enters a poetry contest in Ireland. I haven't actually seen the movie, but I want to.

How do you know when you've played a great set?
I let people rush the stage at my shows, so things get pretty hectic. For me, it's a good sign when the cords get ripped from the equipment. Whenever the amps get knocked over, people boo, but when the music comes back on, it's triumphant. One time in New York, I had to put a kid from the audience in charge of keeping everything plugged in for me. He stood there dancing with the cords in his hands for the whole set. The night before that, the legs of the table got knocked out, and a couple of girls dancing onstage held it up for the entire set. Now that's a party.

Photos courtesy of NickyDigital.com