by SHANE SINNOTT

If you’ve ever found yourself wondering about mash-ups as music, check out Gregg Gillis, who releases stuff under the name Girl Talk (illegalart.net/girltalk). He’s released three albums since 2002, and the latest, last spring’s Night Ripper, contains songs that are less mash-ups than experiments in segues. If you download the track “Hold Up” from his Web site, here’s what you’ll hear in less than three minutes: Mariah Carey, then James Taylor’s “Your Smiling Face” followed by Ludacris’s “Number One Spot” and 50 Cent’s “In da Club,” and then the Pixies’ “Where Is My Mind?”—actually, this is all in, like, the first 40 seconds—and then things settle down, relatively speaking, and you get Puff Daddy, the Buckwheat Boys and finally Weezer’s “Say It Ain’t So,” all in a single track. Needless to say, it’s lots of fun, and if you’re the type that needs some hipster cred with your music recommendations, be advised that professional weirdo Wayne Coyne of the Flaming Lips nominated Night Ripper for the Shortlist Music Prize a few weeks ago, and the guy from Negativland has called it “a plunderphonics party record.”

Gillis is also keenly interested in copyright law—again, this separates him from many other mash-up artists—and recently participated in the filming of The Basement Tapes, a documentary about copyright law in the digital age, by filmmaker Brett Gaylor (says Gaylor, “In the digital age, everything we know about copyright has been turned upside down…”).

All of this bodes well, I would think, for those looking to steal this album online without fear of reprisal. A search for “Night Ripper” + Torrent should do the trick. Oh, and ladies—Mr. Gillis will appear in an upcoming issue of Playgirl.

On a separate note,my pick for the Toronto Bites! Festival this week: The Diableros, who will be playing their shimmering indie pop at Main Hall on Saturday. You can hear tracks off their aptly named album You Can’t Break the Strings in Our Olympic Hearts at the less-than-aptly-named That’s Fucking Dynamite! (thatsfuckingdynamite.com/?m=200612)

Talk like a girl, walk like a man… ssinnott@gmail.com