Here's something you might be interested in.
Ask a Hipster — Advice you didn't know you needed
Big Screen — Movie commentary
Blurt — Music's inside track
Booze News — San Diego spirits
Classical Music — Immortal beauty
Classifieds — Free and easy
Cover Stories — Front-page features
Drinks All Around — Bartenders' drink recipes
Excerpts — Literary and spiritual excerpts
Feast! — Food & drink reviews
Feature Stories — Local news & stories
Fishing Report — What’s getting hooked from ship and shore
From the Archives — Spotlight on the past
Golden Dreams — Talk of the town
The Gonzo Report — Making the musical scene, or at least reporting from it
Letters — Our inbox
Movies@Home — Local movie buffs share favorites
Movie Reviews — Our critics' picks and pans
Musician Interviews — Up close with local artists
Neighborhood News from Stringers — Hyperlocal news
News Ticker — News & politics
Obermeyer — San Diego politics illustrated
Outdoors — Weekly changes in flora and fauna
Overheard in San Diego — Eavesdropping illustrated
Poetry — The old and the new
Reader Travel — Travel section built by travelers
Reading — The hunt for intellectuals
Roam-O-Rama — SoCal's best hiking/biking trails
San Diego Beer — Inside San Diego suds
SD on the QT — Almost factual news
Sheep and Goats — Places of worship
Special Issues — The best of
Street Style — San Diego streets have style
Surf Diego — Real stories from those braving the waves
Theater — On stage in San Diego this week
Tin Fork — Silver spoon alternative
Under the Radar — Matt Potter's undercover work
Unforgettable — Long-ago San Diego
Unreal Estate — San Diego's priciest pads
Your Week — Daily event picks
Girl Talk
When Wired magazine gave Girl Talk a Rave Award in 2007, I think Gregg Gillis was still working his day job as a biotech engineer, jetting off to weekend concerts around the globe, his coworkers unaware of his growing celebrity. Girl Talk started out as Gillis programming little samples and loops with his laptop into party tracks for the amusement of himself and his friends. In this way he made new music from old music, and it caught on. Possessed of an encyclopedic ear for music, Gillis’s gift is such that he knows which radio-baked pop opposites will mash up into artsy combinations. Such music wasn’t around in the analog world — Karen Carpenter bleeding one of her timeless iconic hits all over a Boston chartbuster with beats from 50 Cent laced in? Not likely.
Old-school DJs who actually touched vinyl started this trend back in the ’80s when — thanks to the rock-steady beats of disco music and variable-speed turntables — they learned to spin one record over the top of another by matching beats and slip-cueing records. In time, the tools of the trade changed to computers and software.
The urge is to call Gillis a DJ, but he is not. He is a laptop artist, even though the DJ booth is the cultural space that he occupies. And while his laptop may be doing the heavy lifting, Gillis himself is a wild man in performance, doing hand flips, flogging the mix table, dancing around in his underwear, and crowd-surfing to his own creations sampled from pop hits and songs that may have been samples to begin with. Gillis maintains that he has no actual musical skills, but in a virtual world, he knows how to make music.
GIRL TALK: Street Scene, Friday, August 28. $65; two-day pass, $122.
Here's something you might be interested in.
Girl Talk
Girl Talk
When Wired magazine gave Girl Talk a Rave Award in 2007, I think Gregg Gillis was still working his day job as a biotech engineer, jetting off to weekend concerts around the globe, his coworkers unaware of his growing celebrity. Girl Talk started out as Gillis programming little samples and loops with his laptop into party tracks for the amusement of himself and his friends. In this way he made new music from old music, and it caught on. Possessed of an encyclopedic ear for music, Gillis’s gift is such that he knows which radio-baked pop opposites will mash up into artsy combinations. Such music wasn’t around in the analog world — Karen Carpenter bleeding one of her timeless iconic hits all over a Boston chartbuster with beats from 50 Cent laced in? Not likely.
Old-school DJs who actually touched vinyl started this trend back in the ’80s when — thanks to the rock-steady beats of disco music and variable-speed turntables — they learned to spin one record over the top of another by matching beats and slip-cueing records. In time, the tools of the trade changed to computers and software.
The urge is to call Gillis a DJ, but he is not. He is a laptop artist, even though the DJ booth is the cultural space that he occupies. And while his laptop may be doing the heavy lifting, Gillis himself is a wild man in performance, doing hand flips, flogging the mix table, dancing around in his underwear, and crowd-surfing to his own creations sampled from pop hits and songs that may have been samples to begin with. Gillis maintains that he has no actual musical skills, but in a virtual world, he knows how to make music.
GIRL TALK: Street Scene, Friday, August 28. $65; two-day pass, $122.
Comments