Chris Mooney is a freelance writer and the author of two books, 
If anyone's perfected the science of music, it's Girl Talk.
Regular readers know how I feel about music's power to move and motivate people. Well I've just discovered Gregg Gillis who began as a student of biomedical engineering at Case Western Reserve University. Regardless of whether his art is your style, what Gillis has accomplished on his laptop convinces me he's nothing short of a savant. In what I can only describe as an auditory museum, he samples from Nirvana, Jackson 5, Of Montreal, Metallica, Ludacris, Rick Springfield, Fergie, The Beach Boys, Rage Against the Machine, Missy Elliot, Rod Stewart, Avril, Sinead O'Connor, Tag Team, The Police, Wu-Tang Clan, Queen, and on and on and on. As described in an interview with Pitchfork:
[When Gillis] listens to Top 40 radio... he filters the best of the bunch through his brain, searching for loops, phrases, and sounds that he can later combine into new sample-based compositions.
The result is hundreds of artists spanning decades of music* incorporated into tracks that play as if they were supposed to evolve in synergy. In generation A.D.D., the overlay may work better than the originals in a hustle and flow of sound unlike anything I've heard before. And like Radiohead before him, Girl Talk's latest album Feed The Animals is available to listeners at whatever they want to pay for downloading.
Listen here.
* Note: includes explicit lyrics
Humanities & Social Science
Comments
Scienceblogs just got about 10x cooler.
Love the cross culture take of science here.
Posted by: J | July 21, 2008 9:32 AM
Zzzzz. Sampling art peaked in the early 90s. I'll skip the extra glossy version for the kids who were just kids then. -10 cool points for Sb.
Posted by: Comstock | July 21, 2008 1:18 PM
Commie-
I've been around for quite a while, and yes, Girl Talk is far better and more advanced than the samplers of old. Its one thing to write music with a sample in mind, but its a whole other thing to create songs literally from other songs. Also, there's someone on youtube that has made videos of his material. Oh, Sheril, you forgot James Taylor.
Its a wash for points though, because Girl Talk really broke through last year at Pitchfork. Better late than never, though.
Posted by: steve | July 21, 2008 1:56 PM