Gregg Gillis studied biomedical engineering in college. He’s also been playing music since he was a teenager. Combining that interest in breaking things apart and seeing how they work with his love of music, maybe it’s not all that surprising that Girl Talk was the result. Girl Talk, as anyone who’s been to a dance party in the past few years probably knows, is Gillis’ stage name; he mixes samples of dozens of songs together to make unbelievably smart and fun songs in their own right. His recent album, Feed the Animals, worked its way onto most everyone’s iPods after Gillis and his label, Illegal Art, decided to follow the Radiohead model and let people choose what they wanted to pay for a download. Tonight the Pittsburgh native is coming to the 9:30 Club, to put on a show that sold out long, long ago. We talked with him last week about old friends, Lil Wayne and the economic crisis.

When you do your live shows, I can’t imagine that you’re doing a lot of fly by the seat of your pants stuff. I assume it’s mostly planned ahead?

I do think it’s all very live. I do all the samples by hand. But the arrangements are all very thought out. I don’t ever want it to be an exercise in improvisation or anything like that. I think people get into the albums and the live shows are more about composition. They want to hear what sounds good — you know, this goes with this. For me, it’s a very big trial and error process. It’s not like you could throw out a song and be like, “what would that go good with?” I have no idea. It’s a very long process, trying different things. I spend many hours trying to find something that works. So, in the live setting, the performance of everything is very isolated. If you’re hearing a drum beat playing, that could be four different loops — a kick drum loop, a high hat loop, a snare loop — so at any time I could stop the snare, stop the kick drum, stop the high hat. So it’s very interactive. But, it’s so interactive that it’s difficult for me to even change a little bit. For me it’s like writing a song, and then you know, kind of going out and doing a loose interpretation of it each night. Even if I’m playing the same source material, I could never play it the same way two times in a row.

So I asked the people on DCist’s staff if they had any questions for you, and one of them said that her friend used to be your pen pal growing up.

(laughs) That is not true.

Did you ever have a pen pal named Emily?

Wow, like an internet pen pal?

I’m not sure.

I don’t know… maybe, well, it’s weird. Back when the internet hit big, in my life at least, when I was in like 8th grade or something (like ’95 or ’96), it was crazy to be able to communicate with other people, and that was like the first time. I’ve never been into like… meeting strangers on the internet. Not that there’s anything wrong with that! I think that’s totally cool. And it’s very commonplace these days. Many people meet their husbands and wives that way. And that’s fine! I’m not talking trash on that, but that’s never been my thing. But, when I was in 9th grade, I was on some mailing list for music or something or other, and you could like make your first internet friends. I had never thought of that prior, ’cause the internet wasn’t around. But yeah, actually I had an internet friend named Emily that I have not thought of in 10 years. That was like one of the first people I knew… online. From somewhere else. But that was not a pen pal experience, that was more of a nerdy music experience.

Photo of Girl Talk courtesy Christos Schizas detroitartist dot org