Gregg Michael Gillis[1][2] (born October 26, 1981), better known by his stage name Girl Talk,[3] is an American musician specializing in mashups and digital sampling. Gillis has released five LPs on the record label Illegal Art and EPs on 333 and 12 Apostles.

CareerGillis 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. In school, Gillis focused on tissue engineering. He later worked as an engineer, but quit in May 2007 to focus solely on music.[4]

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,"[5] a criticism that Gillis has attributed to mainstream media that wants "to create controversy where it doesn't really exist," citing fair use as a legal backbone for his sampling practices.[6]

He has given different explanations for the origin of his stage name, once saying that it alluded to a Jim Morrison poem[7] and once saying that it alluded to an early Merzbow side project.[8] Most recently, he attributed the name to a grunge band called TAD, based in Seattle.[9]

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.[10]

Gillis is featured heavily in the 2008 open source documentary RiP!: A Remix Manifesto.

For possible future projects, Gillis is considering creating individual songs rather than full-length albums with the songs tied together.[11] Girl Talk released his fifth LP All Day on November the 15th, 2010 - free through the Illegal Art website.[12]

Album pricingAfter the success of his album Feed the Animals, for which listeners were asked to pay a price of their choosing, Gillis made all of his other albums similarly available via the Illegal Art website.

AwardsIn 2007, Gillis was the recipient of a Wired magazine Rave Award.[13]

Feed the Animals was number four on Time's Top 10 Albums of 2008.[14] Rolling Stone gave the album four stars and ranked the album #24 on their Top 50 albums of 2008. Blender magazine rated it the second-best recording/album of 2008,[citation needed] and NPR listeners rated it the 16th best album of the year.[15]

Gillis' hometown of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania named December 7, 2010 "Gregg Gillis Day".[16]

Film appearancesIn 2007, Girl Talk appeared in Good Copy Bad Copy, a documentary about the current state of copyright and culture.

In 2008, he appeared as a test case for fair use in Brett Gaylor's RiP!: A Remix Manifesto, a call to overhaul copyright laws.

Discography[edit] AlbumsSecret Diary CD (2002, Illegal Art)
Unstoppable CD (2004, Illegal Art)
Night Ripper CD (2006, Illegal Art)
Feed the Animals CD (2008, Illegal Art)
All Day (2010, Illegal Art)