It’s a Friday afternoon in early June in a biomedical research department near Pittsburgh. Employees are scrambling to wrap up their workweeks. While most collars are still pressed, ties are a bit undone and shoes have lost some of that Monday morning polish. It’s been a long week. It could be any office anywhere in America. But this particular one just happens to be a biomedical research facility, and it just happens to be near Pittsburgh.

A then 25-year-old employee is working diligently in the corner, keeping a low profile. The unassuming Gregg Gillis has been going about his tasks as usual — keeping focused on his job, never diving too deep into his personal life during water-cooler chitchat. If a coworker asks about his weekend plans, Gillis will politely dodge the subject, making sure to separate business and pleasure. As the rest of the staff file to the train at the end of the day for a weekend of Pirates baseball, the young researcher makes a B-line for his car en route to New York, or Baltimore, or maybe the airport.

It’s the weekend, which means Gillis transforms himself into Girl Talk — a laptop-sporting musician and one of the most sought-after sample artists in the world. About the time that his coworkers are singing along to the “Seventh Inning Stretch,” Gillis will be shirtless and bouncing around a small club somewhere on the East Coast, leading a sweaty army of beat-starved hipsters through a series of mashed loops and blips.

As Girl Talk, he’s one of a wave of frontmen — full-body performers — who confront their audiences with a full on, sometimes physical, assault of the senses. Alongside the likes of The Show Is The Rainbow and Dan Deacon, Gillis transforms from a mild-mannered introvert into a loud, brash, showman. Often joining concertgoers on the floor or bringing them up on stage, he grinds to his beats shoulder to shoulder with the crowd, instead of from a distance. Last year’s New Year’s Eve show in Chicago began with a suit-clad Gillis lighting a few sparklers and concluded after an hour of near pandemonium with the now-shirtless and sweat-drenched performer gyrating on the dance floor amidst a sea of booty-shaking revelers.

But come Monday morning, it’s back to the office. Back to crunching the numbers. And back to tucking Girl Talk away under his suit, like Clark Kent waiting for his Friday night phonebooth. This was the double life that Gillis led for years. That was until one day in June when he decided that he couldn’t keep it up anymore, strolled into his boss’ office and put in his resignation. For the first time, Girl Talk was to be his career.

“I never explained about Girl Talk. I told them I wanted to take advantage of my youth and travel the world, which wasn’t really a lie but not the complete truth,” Gillis told Chicago Innerview via e-mail from a recent tour of Europe. “When I started working the job, I was only playing shows about once or twice a month. It wasn’t really changing my lifestyle, so I didn’t think there was much reason to try to explain what I do…By the time things started to take off for me, I thought it was too late to try to explain what was going on. They had worked with me for two years already, and if I told them that I purposely didn’t tell them about this huge part of my life, I would have come off like a creep.”

That “huge part” of his life has become even bigger since Gillis decided to don the Girl Talk persona 24/7. Now, those weekend excursions to Miami or jet-setting trips to Brussels have become longer tours that include jaunts to nearby towns eager to take in the Girl Talk phenomenon. And the three LPs that he’s released on Illegal Art (most recently 2006’s Night Ripper) no longer are a hobby, but a professional focus.

These albums have helped push Girl Talk to the forefront of the digital music debate alongside fellow Pennsylvania-based DJ Diplo. With his music consisting primarily of cut-and-pasted samples, Girl Talk’s catalogue is no stranger to scrutiny, with fans and lawyers alike having spent hours picking apart the source of every last note, with the lawyers on the lookout for copyright infringements.

“I think that copyright is necessary to a certain degree, but there’s also a wonderful thing called ‘fair use.’ The thing about the law that’s unfortunate right now is that it’s all so black and white,” Gillis told Chicago Innerview in July. “You either have to respond to what the artists want royalty-wise or it’s fair use, and there’s no compromise. We’re in a time of change where we’re dealing with so many new kinds of technology and so many new kinds of marketing that the laws are going to have to change — they’re going to be forced to. Every pop song that gets recorded is gonna end up on the Internet. So many kids can use PhotoShop, and so many kids can make remixes, that everyone’s re-appropriating culture.”

In case you missed it, this “fair use” clause from the U.S. Copyright Office makes the name of Girl Talk’s label, Illegal Art, purposely ironic. And it’s the specifics of this clause that Gillis has to pay close attention to when narrowing down selections for each track. Clips are subject to re-use based on, among several things, the length sampled in comparison with the length of the original. Copyright officials also must determine whether sampled material will have a negative financial effect on the original work.

Yet tucked away in pages of detailed legislation, the lines between “fair use” begin to blur when dealing with recorded samples and those used in a live setting. Which, for Girl Talk, often mirror each other. “I’ve never considered myself a DJ in the traditional sense, for a large part because of the way I perform live…I do the arrangements beforehand; I try to keep the level of improvisation limited,” Gillis said. “It’s like a band writing a song beforehand, practicing it, and then executing it live…I never play an unaltered track by someone. All of the source material is remixed, layered, and collaged live.”

Yet those live renditions parallel the tracks on his Illegal Art recordings quite accurately. While it’s silly to think that there are lawyers with stopwatches picking apart Girl Talk’s live shows, calculating the number of beats and hijacked clips from the near radio station’s worth of samples in Gillis’ collection, it’s also naïve to assume that there aren’t people out there who would leap at the opportunity to prosecute.

Thus, Gillis is constantly on the lookout for fresh material as to never become too reliant on one artist or track. His eclectic taste in music leads him back and forth between avant-garde noise bands and multi-platinum mainstream names in search of the perfect sample. “I remember going to see Otomo Yoshihide and the Spice Girls in the same week during high school,” Gillis said. “It’s become a habit of mine to constantly be looking out for samples. I have a notepad and pen in my car, and I text message myself reminders all of the time.”

With this office-like efficiency, Gillis is able to multi-task and riffle through song after song, mining just the right clip. During an e-mail exchange with Chicago Innerview, he was in the middle of a reconnaissance mission of sorts, listening to oldies radio in pursuit of material. As he caught up on correspondence, one ear was glued to the radio in hopes of picking out his next hook. Today, this is business as usual for the 26-year-old performer. His home office has replaced the Pittsburgh building. He can go to work in jeans, and nobody will look at him funny if he strips off clothing. In fact, they’ll applaud.

Gillis knows that this is the life that he chose in June. Part of enjoying his youth means that he must embrace the responsibilities that have come with those major decisions, such as being so crunched for free time that he must work on new material mid-interview. He knows that there’s no turning back from Girl Talk and into the Gregg Gillis of old. And that’s perfectly okay with him. Besides, he already quit his day job.

Chicago Innerview Magazine, January 2008