Pitchfork

A little something from last year that got overlooked amongst all the Night Ripper commotion, this 7" offering from mashup artist Gregg Gillis is a surprising departure into freak-folk that uses Appalachian harmonies to-- no, actually it's more spastic cut-up pop-rap-bounce-club-laptop business. By now you're probably in one of two camps when it comes to Girl Talk: either he's a sub-Diplo wigster who makes Real Street Music palatable to girl-jeans anglehairs by spoonfeeding it to 'em alongside a bunch of potential-punchline 80s pop debris, or he's a brilliant pop encyclopedia who hears sonic connections everywhere and does everything short of drilling a hole in his skull to let those ideas play off each other. (Can he be both? Only if you both love and hate irreverence in equal measure.)

Nothing in "Pure Magic" is gonna sway either camp: countering that Robotech guitar riff from Snap's "The Power" with the opening choir chants from "Jesus Walks" is obvious but catchy; pushing the bass from "The Humpty Dance" beneath and strewing hooks from Lil Scrappy's "No Problem" throughout makes it bump, and then Cyndi Lauper's "Time After Time" comes in and it almost doesn't work-- but hey, it's startling and kind of funny. From there on in, the beat gets crowded ("What Happened to That Boy" + "Lean Back" + "Nolia Clap" + "Freek-a-Leek" + "In Too Deep"-- Genesis, not Nas) but never derails, even as it careens inevitably towards glitchy cardboard-box-avalanche sonics and 8-bit interference. I can only imagine how this sounds to someone who's never heard any of the source material, but then, this song wasn't pieced together for them.

MP3: > Girl Talk: "Pure Magic"
[from Bone Hard Zaggin' 7"] | [OUT OF PRINT]

[Photo by Andrew Strasser]