Gregg Gillis, aka Girl Talk, performs Friday night at DeLuna Fest. / Special to GoPensacola.com
GIRL TALK AT DELUNA FEST
Girl Talk is set to perform at 11 p.m. Friday on the Wind Creek Stage at DeLuna Fest.
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Talking shop with Girl Talk
The last time Gregg Gillis — best known by his alter-ego as electronic music artist Girl Talk — performed in Pensacola, it was in February 2009, in the old Brownsville location of Sluggo's, with a packed-in, sweaty throng of dancing fans surrounding him.
These days, Gillis still plays surrounded by packed-in, sweaty throngs of fans. The only difference is the number of people.
At Sluggo's, he was playing for a couple hundred. These days, Girl Talk is a major festival draw, regularly performing for thousands — and more. Audiences that missed him at the Hangout Beach, Music & Arts Festival the past two years will get to catch up with him at DeLuna Fest, where he is among the top names on the festival bill.
It seems like a mercurial rise, but for Gillis, it's been a series of small steps.
"I think when I played Sluggo's, I'd been doing it for seven or eight years, but the first big push for me was when 'Night Ripper' came out," he said during a phone interview. "I thought things were as big as they could get. But since then, everything has pushed forward. I don't think I've ever stopped touring from more than a few weeks.
"And I think musically, I found an audience, and I wanted to keep that evolving within that world, making it more complicated and accessible, simultaneously.
"Even over this past year, I think the show has gotten more orchestrated and more of a production. It went from something really raw, which was cool and insane, but the show size hit the mark where the free-for-all became overly chaotic. It was a thin line between being a fun thing and people being hurt. That's when I started upping the production."
These days, Girl Talk performs with a huge multimedia setup and a crew, where he used to travel solo. And he's still surrounded by fans on stage, but they are brought on by members of his crew.
"Up until 2009, I was against having a barricade to the show," he said. "I wanted people to be able to get up there. But shortly after that tour, as it's gotten bigger, I became open to the idea of having a barricade and picking out people before the show, and ask the people we're bringing up not to break the lights. You can't turn up at a venue with 60,000 people and invite everyone up. Now, it's as smooth as possible when you're rolling with a video wall and confetti blasters."
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Gillis does cop to a noticeable progression toward using longer and more recognizable samples, a move he credits with increasing his popularity, but also increasing his music's complexity.
"With 'Night Ripper,' I think the sample length was a little longer and it was more accessible than what I'd ever done," he said. "I thought it related to sample-based music but sounded different, 150 loops that (were) weaved together. I've always been a fan of pop music, and I think playing the shows and getting the live feedback has really influenced me to use longer chunks, more recognizable songs and go more pop, in a subtle way. Using the longer samples allowed it to be more complicated, finding multiple connections in the songs. Allowing those samples to be bigger has made the connections more involved, more crazy, more complicated, more dense. So it's more complicated, but more accessible at the same time."
Gillis said live reaction has come to influence his recordings, as well. In turn, the sounds achieved on a recording go on to influence the live performance, completing the circle.
"The material is always changing," Gillis said. "With the shows, I like to touch on the albums, but I'm always coming up with new material. I'll look at the album I'm touching on and change up references. It's a collage that's always changing and evolving.
"Every show, there's an opportunity to hear something I've never played before. I feel like a lot of people who have been following my stuff come to multiple shows, so I try to keep it fresh and keep it moving. That's been the goal for years now, to be able to come back and have a distinctly different set. It's always moving forward, hopefully."
