Gregg Gillis, aka Girl Talk, is calling from the shadow of Gillette Stadium in Foxborough, Mass., deep in New England Patriots territory, where he has a Friday night gig on his whirlwind tour of 34 cities in 40 days.

Even though he's on bitter rival turf, at some point during the evening the world's leading laptop artist fully expects to be flashing his Pittsburgh colors -- the black and gold Terrible Towel.

"It's become a thing where, I usually don't come out with a Terrible Towel every show, but a lot of people do," Gillis says. "Maybe every other show there's someone in the building with a Terrible Towel and at the very least, some Steelers shirts."

The Towels, accustomed to this type of stimulation, probably feel right at home in the crazy Girl Talk crowds and no doubt come in handy for all the beer flying about. At the Canoply Club in Illinois last week, the crowd of dancers on stage got so unruly, Gillis' equipment came unplugged three times and the computer had to be wrapped in plastic.

But that's become the norm at Girl Talk's ecstatic rave-ups, requiring the need for a security guard stationed by his side.

Whoever could have imagined that a skinny white kid from Pittsburgh with a biomedical engineering degree would need security on stage to protect him and his laptop?

After years of honing his craft to small crowds in spaces like Garfield Artworks, Girl Talk broke out in a big way in 2006 with "Night Ripper," a jaw-dropping, mind-blowing, booty-shaking mashup of more than 250 samples ranging from Boston to the Ying Yang Twins. Rather than the expected lawsuits for copyright infringement, Gillis was rewarded with Top-10 album nods and the party slot in festivals all over the world.

For his next act, he's gone back to the sampler for the even more ingenious, more relentless, 53-minute barrage of "Feed the Animals," which pits the Spencer Davis Group against UGK, Sinead O'Connor against T.I. and Too Short, The Who against Unk and Quiet Riot against Lil Mama. And that's just the first song.

"Feed the Animals" -- a reference to his audience? -- has been drawing raves from outlets like Pitchfork, Paste, Rolling Stone and Spin since hitting the Internet in June, and now it's in stores as a physical product. After jet-setting around the country and the world this year, the 27-year-old Gillis, now living in Polish Hill, plays his first local show since May Saturday night at Gravity.

Look out, Cheswick.

I remember you saying after "Night Ripper" that you might just make a completely different album. What brought you back to the similar form?

The way I create, the way I come up with ideas for music is primarily based around preparing for live performances, so I think with the response to "Night Ripper," I just started playing so many more shows over the past two years. With that, I wanted to branch out and make some new stuff but also provide music that I thought people coming out to shows would be interested in, something I'd be interested in, so I think that was heavily influential. From there it just kept building up.

Listening to the record, it struck me that what you're expressing is the love of music. And yet I've also read the other side, people arguing that you're treating the music as disposable.

I've always considered my work as paying homage to all the music I'm into. If there was any message to be said in the music, it's kind of breaking down the walls. I value all music, whether it's pop, underground, experimental, whatever. To me, it's all on a level of entertainment. I'm open to embracing all of it. I want to make transformative music and I want to pay respect to the tunes I'm into. I see people approaching my music from a lot of different angles. Some people come out and they're just pop fanatics and love hearing different hooks and melodies and snippets from different music over the years. There are other people who come out who hate pop music and they just like hearing the way I manipulate it. So I'm not pushing this on any particular audience. I'm open to any interpretation of it, but from my perspective, I'm a huge fan of everything I sample.

Have you heard yourself referred to as "The Warhol of Music," and do you think it applies?

I've heard it a couple times. I don't know how accurate that is. There's definitely a connection as far as pop art goes -- recontextualizing popular elements from culture, putting them in a new light and presenting them to new audiences. And, possibly, taking a Campbell's Soup can and getting a silkscreen of that into a museum is somewhat related to taking Kelly Clarkson and doing a remix and being able to present that at Coachella. It's taking these huge cultural artifacts and presenting them to a new audience in a new light. But, yeah, outside of that, I think with any artist you can draw comparisons, and the Pittsburgh thing doesn't hurt.

How do you recognize that two songs are going blend the way they do? Is it a lot of trial and error?

Yeah, it's extremely trial and error. I am just constantly listening to the radio, going through my CD collection on the hunt for songs. I sample snippets of songs and isolate loops, quantitize drum parts, organize a bunch of different things from songs and just catalog it. Then, I sit down in an entirely separate process and just try out as many different combinations as possible and when I hear something that sounds interesting, that's the first step. If I hear two things that blend well together I'll introduce them into the show. From there, I'll see the flow of the show and where it fits: Do I need heavy drums, light drums? I think the experience of playing shows every day builds up and I get a better idea of how to mold that particular sample for what I want to go for.

Do you have a favorite juxtaposition on "Feed the Animals"?

One I really like is the Public Enemy with the Heart "Magic Man" breakdown [on "No Pause"]. The Public Enemy "Rebel Without a Pause" a cappella is something I've been working with a long time, and one of the first mashups I ever heard was from Evolution Control Committee out of Columbus, Ohio, using that particular a cappella, so I got my hands on it and wanted to use it almost paying respect to his work. Same thing with the Heart sample -- the breakdown in that song, I always thought was fantastic. I was dying to put both of them in and they kind of just crept together so I was happy it worked out.

The hip-hop samples you use really seem to be on the harsh or the superficial party side. Is there a reason you're doing that and not using more consciousness hip-hop?

I think it's just my listening preference, and part of putting my own stamp on it is putting a new emotional edge on it. When you sample the harder side of hip-hop or the more surface level radio hits and mix that with something from the other spectrum, from a different world, it puts a new light on it. Which is different than getting some kind of very consciousness hip-hop style and blending it with Wings -- I don't think it would have as much impact, I don't think it would be as transformative. First and foremost, it's what I'm listening to, and some of the radio rap right now is some of the most interesting music being produced.

Are there places where you're just pushing people's buttons? An example would be the Sinead O'Connor part on "Nothing Compares 2 U" [with Too Short]. Seems like some people might a little taken aback.

I think the whole project is almost founded in that. And I think it's gotten away from that a little. It's gotten accessible enough and people understand this enough to where it's not as controversial, but I think when I started doing this -- playing spots like Garfield Artworks and Millvale Industrial Theater and playing with more experimental types and doing a Sinead O'Connor remix or Destiny's Child remix -- it was something that I was very sincere about and I liked the music, but I was also trying to push some buttons. In the early days I always wanted to use pop as an act of rebellion. To this day, I kind of stand my ground on "nothing is off limits" and nothing is too radio-friendly or too corny or too this or too that.

How do you think these albums will hold up over time? Do you think they'll be like a snapshot?

The ultimate goal is to make something new out of this music and I think when "Night Ripper" came out in 2006, the easiest critique of it is they thought it wasn't going to date well because there were so many current samples on there, but as far as my audience goes, vocal samples now from that album, relatively new stuff that came out that didn't last, has lasted in terms of my own music. A good example is like the Ying Yang Twins song "Bad," which was like a minor hit you'd never hear on the radio anymore or, if you heard it at a party people wouldn't get that excited, but it's an integral part of "Night Ripper." When I play that at my shows people get very excited. Now it's like classic material to them, so I think with any electronic music, how it dates is very interesting. As the technology advances, everything becomes easier to produce and the most groundbreaking electronic records 10 years ago sound like any 15-year-old can make that today, so that will probably be the case with my material. But I still think. ... I don't know, I think on musical terms, it could last like any pop record could potentially last.

One obligatory question is: Are you surprised by the lack of legal trouble so far?

It's a hard question to answer, because I believe in what I'm doing, so technically I feel great that nothing has happened. But based on other people who did this style of music -- Negativland, John Oswald, Danger Mouse, Biz Markie -- where it's just been such an issue, I am mildly surprised that we haven't heard from anyone. But at the same time, I feel like it would be a sign of the times, that maybe that's where we are right now with copyright.

Do the shows just get crazier and crazier all the time?

Yeah, I think on this tour, this has been the most exhaustive thing I've ever done. It's been 34 shows in 40 days, and we're coming to the tail end of it, but it's been cool. We've upped the venue sizes and some of them have just become absurd in my mind. In Chicago, I played to 4,500 people at the Congress Theater. It was nuts. It seemed like festival size to me. Along with this tour, I have a couple of old friends coming along helping out on stage visuals trying to make it just a bit more of a spectacle. I'm still really attached to the idea of the show being just me and a computer regardless of what size it becomes, but I brought along a few people just to make the atmosphere more festive. I think the crowd has gotten younger and more diverse and it's just bound to happen as anything gets bigger, so it's been really crazy.

So you have a bouncer on stage with you now to protect you and your laptop?

It's just been a steady evolution of trying to fine-tune this system. On this particular tour, this is the first time where I've ever requested security on stage, just because if it wasn't there, every show would just completely implode within five minutes. It's just too much. The shows have become so large. I like it to be chaotic, I like it to be crazy, but I also like the show to go its full duration if possible, so we've been trying to give me a point man every night who will stand a few feet away from me and basically let things go down, but if it gets to the point where everybody is basically smashed and things are being damaged or I can't move my right arm to click the mouse at all, he'll kind of step in to back people up a little bit. It's something I've never had, but it's come to the point where it's necessary now.

From the money you've made, is there anything you've treated yourself to?

On this tour we actually have a tour bus with beds and a driver and everyone sleeps on the bus. Last year this time I went on a relatively expensive tour, and I drove a Honda Accord the entire way and tour-managed myself and basically pulled up to every venue alone. This tour I took it up a notch to make the shows better.

It was cool seeing the full page on you in Spin. Do you have more of that in the works?

All the press has picked up a bit more. I think for a period of time, where this act fit in was confusing to people -- whether they were supposed to write about it or not based on, "Is this an original artist or is this what it is?" -- so I think this time around, compared to "Night Ripper," I think a lot of press have been excited to cover what is going down.

You looked like such a hippie in Spin.

[Laughs.] I know. I let myself go, man.