MUSIC

House of Blues presents Girl Talk. Moved to Verizon Theater.

Gregg Michael Gillis (born October 26, 1981 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania), better known by his stage name Girl Talk, is an American musician and DJ specializing in mashups and digital sampling. Gillis has released five LPs on the record label Illegal Art and EPs on 333 and 12 Apostles.

Gillis began making music while a student at Chartiers Valley High School in the Pittsburgh suburb of Bridgeville. After a few collaborative efforts he started the solo "Girl Talk" project and continued making music under the Girl Talk alias while studying biomedical engineering at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. He produces mashup-style remixes, in which he uses often a dozen or more unauthorized samples from different songs to create a new song. The New York Times Magazine has called his music "a lawsuit waiting to happen,"a criticism that Gillis has attributed to mainstream media that want "to create controversy where it doesn't really exist," citing fair use as a legal backbone for his sampling practices.

He has given different explanations for the origin of his stage name, once saying that it alluded to a Jim Morrison poem and once saying that it alluded to an early Merzbow side project. Most recently, he attributed the name to a grunge band called TAD, based in Seattle.

In a 2009 interview with FMLY, Gillis stated:

The name Girl Talk is a reference to many things, products, magazines, books. It’s a pop culture phrase. The whole point of choosing the name early on was basically to just stir things up a little within the small scene I was operating from. I came from a more experimental background and there were some very overly serious, borderline academic type electronic musicians. I wanted to pick a name that they would be embarrassed to play with. You know Girl Talk sounded exactly the opposite of a man playing a laptop, so that’s what I chose.

For possible future projects, Gillis is considering creating individual songs rather than full-length albums with the songs tied together.] Girl Talk released his fifth LP All Day on November the 15th, 2010 - free through the Illegal Art website.