girl talk playing tonight at the smash club

girl talk is coming back to pittsburgh on July 31, and thanks to my favorite pittsburgh boy coming up with a very thoughtful birthday gift, i'm gonna be there. i am brimming with the proverbial excitement, as the show i attended of his back in the summer of '07 was one of my favorite concert-going experiences ever.

girl talk has a special place in my heart for many reasons, most importantly because he is from pittsburgh. i did some cursory google-riffic research on him and he also seems like good people (though i would expect nothing less from a pittsburgher.) Greg Gillis was a biomedical engineering student turned researcher who did music as a weekend gig, never expecting it to take off the way it did.

he's a support of ALL music and has the utmost respect for the artists whose work he reinterprets. and hell, he bought Taco Bell for everyone at his May , 2008 show at Mr. Small's. what more could you want from a person, let alone a concert-going experience?

i also know a little bit better now how difficult it is to do what he does. thought it seems on the surface like he's merely taking other people's hard work and mashing it up, it's really a pretty intense creative process and technically very difficult.

i made friends with a guy in Prague who DJed the occasional set at a bar we used to frequent called Blind Eye. he did other shows around Prague but I only ever saw him at the BE. he gave my roommate and i once a rough tutorial on the program and equipment he uses to DJ, and it is hella complicated.

mash ups might be easy to do, but they seem insanely difficult to do well, and nearly impossible to do like Girl Talk does them.

and not only is he a talented artist, he's a unique performer. as he professes, it's not very interesting to watch a guy on stage clicking a mouse. since that's all he needs to do to produce the music for each show, he adds to it by going nuts onstage. he jumps in the crowd, brings the crowd onstage, strips down to his underwear...

the show i attended two summers ago was unreal. i didn't know what to expect, and as soon as the first notes boomed from the amps, the entire crowd broke out into the craziest, most perfect dance party ever. and it never lost energy.

the show this summer is at the Amphitheater at Station Square, which is a drastically different venue than Mr. Smalls; must less intimate, because of both size and the fact that it's outdoors. I'm not sure how Girl Talk's show will translate to an outside venue as I've never seen him at a festival.

the show is on July 31, and i believe the opening acts are "friends" including Wiz Khalifa and Don Caballero. I think the tickets are like $20 which, trust me, is totally worth it. see you there!