Mashing Up a Recipe For an Instant Dance Party

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Don’t discard Girl Talk to the mashup ghetto. Yes, Greg Gilli, the Pittsburg-based producer behind Girl Talk, does make his recombinant music out of fabric shards of other people’s songs. But with “Night Ripper” (Illegal Art), his third and most recent album, Mr. Gillis pushes the mash-up to its over-the-top conclusion.

Ever since compilations such as “Boom Selection_Issue 01” made mashups — the practice of blending the vocals from one song to the music of another — the dance-floor mood ring of 2002, such cleverness has merely become the DJ’s lowest form of wit. And Mr. Gillis is no mere DJ. The 16 songs on “Night Ripper” incorporate some 160 samples, ranging from contemporary hip-hop, R&B, and pop to 1980’s one-hit wonders, fey new wave, and indie rock. Tonight he brings this omnivorous music machine to the Mercury Lounge.

It’s not only the excess of Mr. Gillis’s production that is astonishing, but also how seamlessly it works — and how fun it is to dance to. Like many young producers weaned on the stilted performances of experimental electronic producers hunched over laptops, Mr. Gillis freed his musical mind so that the body could follow. In his world everything is fair game, regardless of genre. “Give and Go” starts off by intermingling the melody of Hall and Oates’s “I Can’t Go for That” with the vocals from Ciara’s “1,2 Step”and then drops out the 1980s blue-eyed soul men to slide in the opening guitar reverberation of Sonic Youth’s “Schizophrenia” — all 45 seconds into a song with two minutes and change to go.

The samples come fast and furious — Nine Inch Nails, Billy Squier, Jay-Z, Lady Sovereign, the Pixies, MIA, Aerosmith, Missy Elliott, and on and on and on. And thus far Mr. Gillis has somehow avoided the attacks of intellectual property lawyers. Mash-ups traded online often cheekily disclose their theft in filenames: “Smells Like Booty” married Nirvana to Destiny’s Child. The idea, as on “Night Ripper,” is to steal something from name-brand Manhattan stores in order to give it away for free at an underground warehouse in Bushwick, Brooklyn.

The effect is equal parts club music’s halcyon days — when DJs didn’t discriminate between rock and disco and pop — and film clip reels that montage together nothing but the so-called good parts, both the crowd-pleasing Academy Awards work of Chuck Workman and the artiness of Bruce Conner. Mr. Gillis is savvy enough to crib snippets from fairly recent hits, such as Nelly’s “Grillz,” and inventive enough to mine creative juxtapositions. His “Smash Your Head” cuts a poignant moment by grafting the Notorious B.I.G.’s first verse from “Juicy” onto Elton John’s plaintive piano from “Tiny Dancer.”

Admittedly, part of the amusement of listening to “Night Ripper” is in making out the source materials as they whip past the ears. Some of the rush comes from the onslaught of song hooks as Mr. Gillis stirs the instantly hummable melodies and pinches of lyrics into his mix, much as the 1980’s “Hooked on Classics” albums made Beethoven an FM-radio regular. But the real thrill is, quite simply, that Mr. Gillis doesn’t do anything to stop the proverbial good times. “Night Ripper” is an instant party, and in live performances Mr. Gillis is duly able to frappe his infectious propulsion on the fly. In three months Girl Talk’s musical curry might sound as tired as Rumpletstiltskin, but its insouciant joy and restless abandon make it suited for its moment.

August 18 at the Mercury Lounge (217 E. Houston St., between Avenue A and First Avenue 212-260-4700).


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