There is one constant in Greg Gillis' concerts: No matter where he plays, he will eventually be shirtless.
"It varies night to night how much clothes will be on at the end, but it's very difficult for me to keep the shirt on," said Gillis, aka laptop electronica dance artist Girl Talk. "It's more or less just instinct to be tearing the clothes off, and a lot of time it is extremely heated and I have to free myself of those clothes."
It's actually more surprising that audience members don't ditch their own shirts as they keep pace with their party host, hopping and bopping along as he punches in wildly energetic mash-ups on his laptop.
His concerts play out more like rock shows, raw and energetic, unscripted and off the hook.
"I try to keep the shows physical. I would rather be on the dip of (punk rocker) Iggy Pop than a traditional Kraftwerk (the seminal 1970s German electronica band)," he said during a phone interview from home in Pittsburgh to chat about his show at the Rialto Theatre on Wednesday.
His instrument is his laptop, where he creates mash-ups of pop songs. Occasionally, he will include additional instrumentation, but he masks it so that all you hear are snippets and samples of songs you would hear on the radio, from pop and hip-hop to classic rock from the 1970s and '80s.
Gillis has been making his music since the early 2000s, drawn to electronica from the pioneering purveyors. His intent was never to create wholly original music, but to "kind of try to make new music out of previously released music," he explained. He is able to do this legally without the consent of the original artist through the U.S. fair-use law, which limits the amount of an original work that you can use legally without it infringing on copyrights. Gillis has long contended that because he is sampling snippets of works he is within the realm of infringing on the copyright.
What he walks away with is music that sounds familiar and yet refreshingly new. And it's a trend that Gillis sees continuing in today's digitally driven world.
"I think a lot of young people now, so many are attached to computers or phones. And there are just so many music-making tools that I think we are going to see more and more people taking alternative routes to make music outside of traditional musical instruments," he explained. "I'm guessing that we are at an all-time high of people actually making music on computers or just fooling around and having access to it and just doing it."
Gillis, 30, comes from a musical background of sorts. When he was in high school, he was in a number of electronica rock bands. His instrument of choice was a synthesizer.
"It was all very experimental, never traditional," said Gillis, who doesn't play an instrument. "From those early bands I started to experiment with sampling a little bit, but it was working with CDs and skipping and cutting up cassettes or playing a bunch of records simultaneously to produce sound."
When he set out for college, he had a laptop, and that opened a whole new musical world. It was the mid-1990s and the world of electronica music created on laptops was just getting started.
"There was a small subculture of people focusing on (musical) collage, which didn't have to use a computer. I was a fan of all that stuff, so I decided to start a project that would be based entirely around cutting up pop music," he said.
A career was born, and by the time he finished college, he was totally immersed. He left an engineering career to pursue music full time and has never looked back.
When it comes to performing live, Gillis decided early on that his shows would be a hybrid of rock concert, laptop show and electronica dance show.
"I don't want people to think about it in terms of 'Oh this is a laptop show.' I want them to think of it as a show," he said. "From early on it really was about getting out there and interacting with the audience and getting physical, jumping on people, getting people on stage. Doing anything you can and kind of making it live on those terms."
"I've always tried to frame them in terms of being at a rock show," he added.
As the show has evolved over the past 11 years, he has added lighting effects, confetti, balloons and custom video to "make the show a spectacle. I think that's kind of what we're approaching now."
If you go
• What: Girl Talk in concert.
• When: 8 p.m. Wednesday.
• Where: Rialto Theatre, 318 E. Congress St.
• Tickets: $30 in advance at www.rialtotheatre.com, $32 day of show.
