Girl Talk

Girl Talk is the solo project of Gregg Gillis, who started making music in Pittsburgh in the early 2000s. His first album, "Secret Diary," came out in 2002 and was built from samples stitched together into something new. The approach was simple: take pieces of other songs and rearrange them into dance tracks that felt both familiar and completely fresh.

Things picked up with 2006's "Night Ripper," which turned heads with its nonstop energy and clever sampling. Songs like "Bounce That" became party staples, mixing rap vocals with rock guitars and pop hooks in ways that got people moving. The album's success brought attention, but also questions about copyright, since Gillis's work depends entirely on borrowing from other artists.

He kept releasing albums like "Feed the Animals" in 2008 and "All Day" in 2010, each one a dense collage of hundreds of samples. The music doesn't really sound like traditional electronic production, it's more like a live DJ set frozen into album form, where recognizable snippets of Top 40 hits, classic rock, and underground rap all crash together. Tracks such as "Don't Stop" and "Give Me A Beat" typify the style: hectic, joyful, and designed to overwhelm a dance floor.

Girl Talk's recordings are essentially studio versions of his chaotic live shows, where he'd perform with a laptop amid crowds that often joined him on stage. The project has stayed largely a one-person operation, with Gillis handling the sampling and sequencing himself. While he's worked with other artists occasionally, the core sound remains his own particular brand of musical recombination, built from the pieces of other people's songs.