CHRISTMAS COMES EARLY

There are many reasons why I love the internet, but a day like today is a pretty good example. I was working (yes, actually) working on my computer when I see a tweet scroll by that says "Girl Talk Album Review."

What? New Girl Talk Album? Yup, it's true. You can download it for free at his website:
http://www.illegal-art.net/allday/

To understand my excitement, perhaps a little background is order. Girl Talk is basically the Beethoven of the mashup genre. He takes hundreds and hundreds of small hunks of songs and assembles them into full length mixes that become something above and beyond the source material. I compare him to Beethoven because he hears sound differently than other people and is able to turn that sound into art. If you want to see an example of how he works, check out this video I shared in this space last year:
http://workman.blogspot.com/2009/03/more-girl-talk.html

Girl Talk's (real name: Greg Gillis) last album, "Feed the Animals," was nothing short of brilliant. I'll go so far as to call is the coolest musical thing ever. About 350 samples were used to create the album. There are moments on that album that actually made me scream with joy the first time I heard them.

That sounds a bit extreme, I know. I assure you, I'm a pretty-much sane person. However, my brain is hooked up a little oddly to the point where certainly auditory forms of stimulation affect me more than others I know. So when I can listen to 300 great songs in an hour, it just knocks me on my back.

How best to describe this? When Girl Talk plays Deee Lite, Nirvana, and Salt-N-Peppa at the same time, I swear I can feel the individual parts of my brain that store these songs being stimulated and the synapses creating new and strong connections between them. It feels good. It kind of tickles.

So seemingly out of nowhere, the internet drops a new Girl Talk release. Just like the Radiohead album a few years ago, the time between knowledge of the release and listening to it is remarkably short. I would have been even shorter if Girl Talk's website hadn't kept on crashing.

Instead of a gradual roll out where the music press gets to listen and write and tell us what to think about it, we all got to listen at the same time. Within minutes, trainspotters took to Wikipedia and blogs to start trying to identify the hundreds of samples that make up "All Day." (Good luck, after more than two years of searching, there are still at least 15 samples from "Feed the Animals" that haven't been found yet.)

So now it's extremely late and I'm taking my second spin through this new album. Do I love it as much as the previous one? It will take some time to know, but any album that mashes up Radiohead and Ol' Dirty Bastard without making it sound like a gimmick is probably pretty good.

Ooh... Beastie Boys and Iggy Pop! No more writing, only listening.