Girl Talk's Gillis - The man likes to party.

The idea of the mashup is easy to grasp — take a slice from song A, pair it up with a bit of song B and stir until you get a completely new piece. These tracks are copyright carpet bombs that pillage any artist's available discography.

But what Girl Talk (Gregg Gillis) does is much more dramatic in comparison. Gillis smashes and splatters music onto his digital canvas like a Jackson Pollock painting, using up to 30 different samples in a track to create something that seems absolutely chaotic at first, but is meticulously calculated. The end result is a pop-music seizure, spit-shined and polished to perfection.

"I don't just put songs on top of each other," Gillis says in a recent phone interview. "There's layers of beats and original stuff — how many DJs would want to do that? During shows, I'm behind a laptop — I mix and mash a whole bunch of loops on the fly. I know what will transit into what, but I've got a lot of freedom."

The Pittsburgh native recently graduated from Case and now works a day job in biomedical engineering, flying out on the weekends to perform. He got his start in high school as part of a noise band that utilized sampling from Top 40 radio. But when Gillis was finished with that project, he decided to form a new one based entirely on the pop-music sampling he worked with in his previous group.

"The early stuff was more just processing of sounds and paring apart songs," he says. "Over the past five or six years, we've evolved and produced more accessible songs."

For the uninitiated, Girl Talk's older material has a sonic Frankenstein quality to it. On the track "Non-Stop Party Now" from 2004's Unstoppable, Gillis splices Khia's "My Neck, My Back" with Richard Marx's "Right Here Waiting" and equal parts of Busta Rhymes' "Put Your Hands Where My Eyes Can See." When all is said and done, you can picture Gillis standing behind his musical science project, summoning it to confuse and simultaneously astonish the masses.

"For every sample I used on the record, 50 samples weren't used," he says. "A lot of things sound great, but not in the right context. I sample at least a couple of songs every day."

His latest full-length, last year's Night Ripper, is practically radio-friendly. The record leads off with "Once Again," which comprises samples from Ciara, Ludacris, Oasis, the Verve Pipe and a dash of Michael Jackson, resulting in layered complexity that keeps the audience wondering what bit of nostalgia it'll be hit with next.

"I like to cram a bunch of stuff in there — but there's an invisible line of "too hectic,' since there are so many options and combinations you can do," Gillis says. "If I have something that sounds good for a whole minute but I can use it in a 10-second chunk, I just go with it. If it doesn't fit perfectly, I won't use it."

Gillis will sometimes distort the sample beyond instanteous recognition. "Hand Claps" showcases a reorganized sample of Abba's "Dancing Queen" that sounds like a melodic roller coaster peeling off the tracks, all while Gwen Stefani and Sir Mix-a-Lot stammer to the beat. And as for some of the other less obvious samples? Gillis challenges you to find Al Green's "Let's Stay Together" on Night Ripper.

"I rarely hear music and think it'll go well with something else — I just sample music I like, such as hip-hop," Gillis says. "My favorite style is when hip-hop uses cut-up samples; it's cool when rap artists reconceptualize pop songs. You can take these familiar elements and use them as your instruments — turning them into a brand-new product."

Should you decide to bring it out and see Gillis perform, be advised this isn't a man acting like an automaton behind a turntable; Gillis likes to party. At a crowded show in Pittsburgh, he took a swan dive off of the stage and cracked a tooth — all while his mom watched from the crowd. Gillis maintains this behavior is just the status quo.

"People strip me of my clothes occasionally, and I'll dance on the table," he says. "I like to put on a show. I get people on stage and break the barrier down between the audience members and myself. I turn it into a party where people feel comfortable enough to pour beers on my head."