You don’t even need to get to the end of the first track of Night Ripper (Illegal Art), the third full-length from Pittsburgh’s Gregg Gillis, a.k.a. Girl Talk, to get a smile of recognition and likely your head a-bobbing. Listen just a bit and hear Slim Thug and Ying Yang Twins dropping their well known, club-tried rhymes to snatches of prog rock from Genesis, Oasis’ psychedelic Britpop and Boredoms’ noise cacophony dipping in and out. This is just the tip the iceberg.

The record is a feast for the ears—blasting and connecting snippets of hip-hop, top-40 pop and indie and classic rock—Gillis’ improbable mix sounds something like an iPod gone awry but congruently so. “Smash Your Head” stitches together Notorious B.I.G.’s “Juicy,” Elton John’s “Tiny Dancer” and Pharcyde’s “Passing Me By” in a near perfect blend. The hard party soundtracking of “Friday Night” elegantly bangs together Billy Squier and Black Crowes with Public Enemy and J-Kwon, to name just a few. The whole record is a seemingly unending shopping list of samples.

The foundations of hip-hop itself are based on rappers toasting lyrical over established pop hits (Sugarhill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight” uses Chic’s “Good Times” as a musical bed) or rough-and-ready rock riffs (Rick Rubin putting Run-DMC together with Aerosmith to reinvent “Walk This Way”). The Beastie Boys upped the ante and ushered in the sampledelic era with 1989’s Paul’s Boutique and DJ Shadow later abstracted it in 1996 with the groundbreaking Endtroducing. From there on, it’s been a game for artists and producers to see where sampling could be taken to the next level.

Buffalo’s DJ Kream mastered mixing classic rock licks with street beats long before the term “mashup” became a buzz. Dangermouse became the de facto master of mashup with 2005’s The Grey Album that combined Jay-Z and the Beatles. The Internet and computer-based production software has bred a generation of bedsit laptop artists doing it.

So Night Ripper is hardly the first time something like this has been done, but rarely has it been done with the skill and grace Gillis has achieved.

The online resource Wikipedia shows its users continually updating the entry for Night Ripper, cataloging the samples from each track as new ears decipher the layers of song bits within. That kind of fan devotion hints at a similarity to Girl Talk’s own work. It’s something just south of genius, veering toward obsessive. There’s a precision in taking pieces of something to make something entirely new. (It’s no surprise that Gillis’ day gig is in bioscience research.)

And Gillis isn’t just randomly splicing samples and putting them side by side. He insists there’s a lot of thought that goes into the process. The result is a frenzied but utterly fun collaging to make a wholly new piece of art. Recontextualizing is part of the Girl Talk game. In the sticky world of copyrighted materials, sample-snipping artists know there’s a lawsuit at every turn.

“My label, Illegal Art, and I are just a little worried about potential legal repercussions. But we stand by the fair use law; that we do recontextualize the source material into a new whole,” Gillis told Pitchfork.com in an August 2006 interview.

“I don’t know if our argument would hold any water. Regardless of whether it does or not, I absolutely think that it should be legal because I really don’t feel like we’re potentially hurting the sales of the artists sampled on the record. If anything, it’s potentially promoting the artists sampled. We haven’t heard from anyone yet but we’re just waiting for a cease and desist to come in the mail.”

To date, there haven’t been any letters or lawsuits. Meanwhile, Night Ripper has taken Girl Talk from underground hype to a full-blown phenomenon. The record ranked on many best-of-the-year lists—including a top 40 spot on the Village Voice’s taste-making Pazz and Jop poll—and his skills as a remixer are in high demand among premier artists. His live set moves beyond the usual “laptop live” boredom of similar artists for a juiced-up vibe more akin to a rock-and-roll show. I’ve even been told that he can make the hipster kids dance. That’s an impressive feat.

Girl Talk appears this Friday, April 13 at 9pm at Soundlab with special guests Ninja High School and Mark Webb.