I came from a more experimental background and there were some very overly serious, borderline academic type electronic musicians. The whole point of choosing the name early on was basically to just stir things up a little within the small scene I was operating from.

The name Girl Talk is a reference to many things, products, magazines, books. In a 2009 interview with FMLY, Gillis stated: Gillis has said the name sounded like a Disney music teen girl group. In 2009, he attributed the name to Tad, the early 1990s SubPop band, based in Seattle. Gillis has given his own different explanations for the origin of his stage name, once saying that it alluded to a Jim Morrison poem and once saying that it alluded to an early Merzbow side project. The New York Times Magazine has called his releases 'a lawsuit waiting to happen', a criticism that Gillis has attributed to mainstream media that wants 'to create controversy where it doesn't really exist', citing fair use as a legal backbone for his sampling practices. He produces mashup-style remixes, in which he uses often a dozen or more unauthorized samples from different songs to create a mashup. Gillis worked as an engineer, but he quit in May 2007 to focus solely on music. As he aged, he started to like older artists such as The Beatles. Gillis has also stated that he was always into hip-hop and pop music. He stated that he was first introduced to the genre of Plunderphonics by John Oswald. He has also stated interest in punk rock, as well as noise music artist Merzbow. Gillis states his musical inspirations to have been Squarepusher, Aphex Twin, Just Blaze, Nirvana and Kid606 among others. In school, Gillis focused on tissue engineering. After a few collaborative efforts, he started the solo 'Girl Talk' project while studying biomedical engineering at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. Gillis began experimenting with electronic music and sampling while a student at Chartiers Valley High School in the Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania suburb of Bridgeville.

Girltalk mashup