Girl Talk - Give Me A Beat.mp3Girl Talk - Set it Off.mp3Peter Bjorn and John - Lets Call it Off (Girl Talk Remix).mp3

Here’s a show I’ve been excited to check out for a while. Greg Gills began producing his own style of mashup tracks while studying biomedical engineering in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and has since progressed from playing house parties to packed clubs around the world. His music has been called “a lawsuit waiting to happen” and it is, but it doesn’t seem that it is his music which has brought him most of his fame. Girl Talk tracks are far from the easiest thing to dance to, and while they can often get a crowd moving by giving them tastes of their favorite songs without ever letting the set stagnate, he has been described as producing “the Family Guy of music” often seen as dropping random tracks simply for the novelty of being able to do so and coming out with something that is not complete garbage. What did amaze me about Girl Talk, however, was the crazy energy he put out on stage, and how that made it in to the show.

Greg Gills solves the paradigm of audience involvement by making them part of the energy on the stage which in turn gets everyone on the floor moving. By allowing the crowd to pack the stage at the beginning of the night and keeping huge crew of people there dancing over the course of the night, he kept the floor raging for more. Trying to get anywhere near the front of the stage was equivalent to being in a mosh pit, inclusive with a risk of being kicked in the head by any one of the crowd surfing 90 pound girls, and if you managed to survive that you ran the risk of getting soaked with Girl Talk’s sweat as he energetically bounces around on stage while getting undressed, eventually standing on his table soaked in sweat in nothing but a pair of boxer shorts. This guy is fucking crazy. Combined with two stage assistants, dressed as a dirty police officer and something like one of the daft punk guys, these two just wandered around the stage with leaf blowers blowing rolls of toilet paper over the crowd, hitting them with cool air, throwing out balls and eventually a bunch of huge bags in the shape of G and T. Very cool.

All Photo credit Given to Douglas Dollars.

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