Gregg Gillis is a biomedical engineer turned full-time musician. Better known as Girl Talk, Gillis throws huge parties anywhere he goes, sampling Top 40 songs from the past and present and combining them to make a new, exciting sound for the audience. Gillis, who will play a sold-out show at Abe & Jake’s Landing, 8 E. 6th St., tonight, recently chatted with Jayplay about his unconventional career so far.

Jayplay: Explain the name Girl Talk.

Gregg Gillis: When I was getting going I was really involved in a scene of musicians that were borderline experimental and it was overly serious. I wanted to pick a name that was very pop so I went with a name that sounded like a Disney girl-group of teenagers. To me it just represented something that wasn’t in the same world as a guy playing a computer.

How did you get into music?

I was always into the idea of forming bands as soon as I was 13 or 14 but I didn’t have any traditional training. I started a lot of bands and played keyboards or drum machines.  

 I started playing pretty actively in high school. I was involved with electronics and synthesizers and I even did sampling using skipping CDs and cutting cassettes.

You lived a sort of double life for a long time, not telling your co-workers that you were flying across the country on weekends to play shows. What was it like when you finally had to tell them?

At first I didn’t think it was necessary to tell anyone what I was doing, but two or three years later it was starting to blow up and I thought then it was too late to tell them. I had to pick one or the other. I went the obviously more fun route of flying out and partying for a living. I didn’t want to seem like a liar or a creep so I just told them that I was quitting to travel and take advantage of my youth, which is kind of related to what I was doing.

 A lot of people who worked in the Pittsburgh [my hometown] media were cool with not using my real name but about a year later people started freely posting pictures of me and using my real name. So my co-workers saw that and they were really surprised. I think they all think it’s hilarious and get a big kick out of it. I don’t think they could’ve ever imagined it.

You’re now doing music full time. Do you plan on going back to biomedical engineering?

Potentially. It’s a little difficult once you start doing music professionally. Money starts factoring into decision making and I never planned out for this to be a career for me. I never made money off of it for six years. It wasn’t like I was failing, it was just for fun and something I was passionate about.

 The fact that it’s blown up is great and I’m really happy. I want to do what I can to keep pushing myself musically, keep the whole thing evolving. If I eventually want to stop or no one wants to listen anymore I don’t think going back to a cubicle would be failing. Regardless I’ll still make music just the way I was making music before.

What is your creative process?

It’s not very intuitive to me. It’s trial-and-error-based. I hear things when I’m listening for samples or listening to music for fun.

 Things jump out at me that I want to use. Anything that has some elements not there, something that I could add something to: vocals, bass lines, melodies. I have a running list of things I want to sample and chop up and every day I sit down and do different things to manipulate them. I’m just preparing tools to make something in the future. Once I have these the second part of the process is trial and error of combining different things and I might try out hundreds of combinations. It’s a matter of which fits the best.

What is your take on originality? Sampling others’ music could be considered unoriginal, plagiarism, etc.

I’m a big fan of everything I sample and I try not to be tongue-in-cheek about it. I do believe that if you trace the musical world there is so much music based on something from the past. Here in 2009, it’s almost impossible to have a truly original thought. I feel like with all music you reference the past. I know I walk a fine line where it is, to some people, the most original music and to some it might not be. That’s part of the excitement for me, to generate that debate to get people thinking about originality.

Is there any band or individual you find taboo that you wouldn’t sample?

I don’t think so. For me some of the most sacred music is stuff I grew up listening to in the ’90s like Nirvana or Dr. Dre and I’ve kind of cut those artists to pieces. I’ll sample whatever but if there is really a classic band or artist that has a huge cultural impact, for instance, The Beatles, but I didn’t listen to them much growing up and I would be hesitant to cut up something with such an influence that I wasn’t familiar with. I just want to make sure I understand [the music] on the same level of the fans.

The last few shows you’ve done in Lawrence have sold out the day the tickets went on sale. How did it get that way?

It’s been a good run. For the past two years or so I would have to say 95 percent of shows have sold out everywhere in the United States. It’s been crazy. You never really know how it’s going to go. Two or three years ago when it started jumping off for me and the shows were selling out I was very surprised.

I thought it was peaking and didn’t know if it could get any bigger. As I toured it just got bigger and it’s still growing. It’s been a really crazy ride.