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TRACK: Shut The Club Down

WHO: Gregg Gillis, until only recently a biomedical engineer, now replacing Ronson as the go-to party dude.

WHAT: One man, a laptop, some MP3s and a flagrant disregard for copyright law.

HYPE: “Like 2 Many DJs speeding their nuts off or the result of eating every 'NOW...' compilation ever and vomiting it onto wax, it's a veritable force of all that's good." NME

WE SAY: Hmmmmm, mash-ups. Bear with me a second, I’m just going to Ask Jeeves what stage we’re at with them, whether we’re ashamed that we ever listened to them or not. Right, apparently we here in the UK are a bit over them on the whole, but still don’t object to the odd bit of Jaguar Skillz. Intriguingly, Americans are lapping them up at the moment, mainly thanks to Girl Talk, who seems to be causing the same amount of legal issue-based hilarity stateside that The KLF managed waaaaaaaayyyy back in 1987 when they got their arses kicked by Whitney and Abba’s lawyers.

So clearly, noone could argue we need to batten down the hatches over the whole guerrilla sampling thing – should we even acknowledge this musical court jester?

Well, for an act that is no more than a guy tinkling around on a laptop, he’s blowing up like nobody’s business on the live circuit. Committed to getting his oeuvre (is it really his though, technically speaking?) to the masses, Gillis has managed to turn an exercise in bedroom geekiness into some kind of live-action Laptop Hero, his shows literally a sweaty, shirts off, crowd-surfing, stage-storming riot. Also known for playing at art galleries, he’s intriguingly blurring the boundaries of what music and performance should be about.

Kicking off with an Avril Lavigne lift before channelling Tupac, Rod Steward, Cool Kids and Toni Basil, Shut The Club Down joyrides through hip hop, rock, R&B and pop, proving that genre classification is only based on minute differences – take them away and music achieves a weightless purity. Or something. Like Marcel Duchamp before him, Girl Talk realises the decision and selection is as important a part of the process as the creation. As Gillis says himself: “It's not about who created this source originally, it's about recontexualizing.”

Like 2 Many DJs, Richard X and Erol Alkan before him, Gillis has sussed that as well as needing supreme technical execution, the choices need to completely redefine and renose the material, manipulating our feelings for the tracks – as in his matching of glorious Dee-Lite with Nirvana. Instead of being an act of needless subversion it reconstitutes a moribund classic as a pop joy.

Is it worth bigging up though? Is it music? Maybe not, but the only way you’ll have more fun is by watching Jeremy Clarkson arm-wrestle a grizzly bear.

IF I ONLY KNOW ONE THING: Gillis has followed Radiohead’s lead by making his album available on a pay-what-you-want basis. Pay what you want for over 300 songs – bargain, ne c’est pas?

Shut The Club Down is available now via Myspace on the download-only album Feed The Animal, which will be released here in October.

FIND MORE: http://www.myspace.com/girltalk

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