The Witzard

Girl Talk CREDIT: Joey Kennedy Girl Talk is the music-making alias of mash-up maestro, super-producer, and beat-maker Gregg Gillis. Girl Talk famously rose to prominemce in the early to mid-2000's with his unique sample-filled releases Night Ripper (2006,) Feed The Animals (2008,) and ALL DAY (2010.) Gillis soon ascended to large-print typeface atop countless festival bills and, eventually, got so busy, he had to quit his day job as a bio-medical engineer. Even prior to Night Ripper, Gregg Gillis had been quietly making music as Girl Talk since about 2000-02 and had issued a number of releases, including, but not limited to, Secret Diary, Unstoppable, Stop Cleveland Hate 12-inch, and Bone Hard Zaggin' 7-inch EP with Illegal Art, 12 Apostles, and 333 Recordings, respectively. Arguably, his most successful—and in our opinion, most enjoyable—release from this period would be 2006's Night Ripper, which boasts some 300 inter-woven samples. Gregg Gillis was able to lega...

Not entirely unlike it's highly-revered Classic/Indie Rock predecessors Sgt. Pepper's and The Blue Album , sample grand-wizard Gregg Gillis aka Girl Talk ultimately intended for his latest body of work, Broken Ankles EP to function as "a continuous mix and it intended to be listened to as a while with gap-less playback." The Pittsburgh native then recruited veteran emcee Freeway from the neighboring suburb of Philadelphia to overlay gritty complex rhyme schemes atop his multi-layered 6-track mini-album, which somehow still manages to sample everyone from Aretha Franklin to Nine Inch Nails . For the purposes of this very EP, Girl Talk & Freeway have both slightly modified their respective styles, but not to the point that it's beyond recognizable or would endanger alienating long-time fans. I'm actually a little surprised at how good most of Girl Talk 's beats sound; they're 100% full-fledged Hip-Hop beats with sufficient room for additi...

While I've been an avid supporter of Girl Talk aka civilian engineer Gregg Gillis' hyper-disoriented (s)mash-up style since the initial media on-slaught of Night Ripper (2006), I never thought I'd see the day when he'd commit a full-fledged collaboration with a real-life rapper to wax, let alone former Roc-A-Fella affiliate and Philly native, Freeway ; to the best of my knowledge, Gillis hasn't worked alongside an emcee since his 2011 Pitchfork Selector -initiated Jim Jones track, "Believe In Magic." It seems as though Broken Ankles is just a small chunk of a recorded, albeit unreleased, body of work, the first of which will become available for FREE download this upcoming April 8th. "Tolerated"' s Allen Cordell -directed video treatment is loosely inspired by late 90's Brit -hit "Bittersweet Symphony." "I just thought it'd be cool to do a video where the premise is me and Freeway walking down the street and ...