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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

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