In the liner notes for Night Ripper, Girl Talk’s Gregg Gillis thanks the 164 separate bands and artists he sampled in making the album, from Three 6 Mafia to Paula Abdul to the Breeders. Spread over 16 tracks, the samples range from a minute of a rap a cappella to a couple of seconds of looped guitar, all cobbled together and overlayed so that as many as four or five familiar components may be audible at any given time. As such, the music would appear to occupy a space somewhere between the most frenetic DJ mix ever conceived and a ridiculously complicated mash-up. However, whereas mash-ups and DJ mixes are still intrinsically, inescapably defined by their components, a Girl Talk song is something all its own.
In arranging pop-culture collages that transcend their source material, Girl Talk may be comparable to recent press darling and plunderphonic artist Jason Forrest (formerly of Donna Summer). However, where Forrest and many of his contemporaries typically rely on heavy DSP processing and deconstruction of their material (though for Forrest, less so on his latest), with occasionally angular, clunky results, Gillis’ work is often seamless and surprisingly catchy. It’s fragmented pop, yes, but still very much pop. Even the extra drum loops and synth parts of his own creation that Gillis occasionally adds into the mix complement rather than overshadow the rest.