Illegal Art

. after 13+ years of hiatus we are finally rebooting! out now: Myth Math “Deep Down” single & video new project by Illegal Art founder see @mythmath_ bio for links forthcoming: • Myth Math - Tongues EP (vinyl) - out July 10 • untitled EP (vinyl) - produced by Girl Talk with soon-to-be-announced artists! • People Like Us - The RHiZOME LP (lathe-cut vinyl + CD) • Yea Big + Kid Static - On a Tangent EP (cassette) & Adapting to Gravity LP (vinyl) plus we will be adding the entire Illegal Art archive from 1998-2012 for free streaming & download on Bandcamp stay tuned for updates on new releases, and archival material from Illegal Art as we celebrate the relaunch

. 2008 Guardian article covering Steinski and Girl Talk. Thanks to @justthetypeuk for sending this. Lisa worked at In House Press and describes it as "one of my favourite release campaigns." A lot of this was happening since @melodic_records was helping us with our releases in Europe.

. Happy Birthday, Ibby! @ibbycolbert did the design for the Illegal Art reboot & Myth Math web pages, helps with social media, and is doing editing for an upcoming Myth Math video appropriation. She's also family.

. Tongues lyric detail #1 A recurring theme on Tongues is self-expression. This wasn’t intentional, but it became obvious as the refrains for “Deep Down” and “Lift” landed with “our tongues untied” and “let me riff.” And the final track, “Our Lips,” also touches on this with the phrase “our lips are moving.” I could mention many things on this theme, but I’ll start with the embrace of songwriting in the Myth Math project. In college, I tinkered with songs, but it felt naive and pedestrian. Years later, though, I felt I wanted to say more than I was able to with abstract electronic sounds, improvised noise, or micro-sample cut-ups. Even though I immersed myself in experimental music traditions (a nice oxymoron), I was a fan of singer-songwriters. In fact, sampling was a means of embedding experimental audio with the patina of song. So, I embarked on finding my voice as a songwriter. And if they’re my songs, I should probably sing them. The second line in “Deep Down,” “my lungs are full of silent words,” is an aspirational sentiment that somewhere inside I have meaningful put-it-on-my-sleeve stories to tell. I’m tapping into the abundance of expressive possibilities that exist in writing, singing, and producing songs. In my mind, there’s a clear backstory and emotional underpinning to each track on Tongues, as veiled as some of it may still be. #tongueslyricdetail

. Illegal Art Archive catalog # IA119 Junk Culture - West Coast Oct 27, 2009 At the label’s height we released Junk Culture’s debut EP that we discovered via a demo. It perfectly fit our mood in 2009 with catchy loops, dirty tapestries, and a fair measure of attitude. Deepak Mantena’s Junk Culture went on tour, eventually joining Girl Talk and Max Tundra in 2011 for 16 shows. The “West Coast” video remains one of our all-time favorites. Hop over to YT for the full experience: /watch?v=gYG1uUWJdYo Rough Trade described West Coast thoroughly: “the newest signee to the illegal art label, deepak mantena’s junk culture is pure high-bit-low-fi-grit-pop beauty. constructed with compelling samples and the tastiest of beats via a cheap zoom h2 field recorder, deepak says he doesn’t worry so much about fidelity as he does evoking certain moods and feelings. and feeling is exactly what ‘west coast’, is overflowing with. but don’t let the talk of lo-fidelity fool you, junk culture’s recordings sound amazing! from the first chick-chick-chick-chicks to the very last mumbling voice, ‘west coast’ is warm and friendly and absolutely breathtaking. deepak has been producing music, programming, performing and making short films for eight years, and under the banner of junk culture it is all coming together. re-worked for the live shows, junk culture’s material is energetic and raw. junk culture’s performances feature live percussion, vocals and projected visuals all snuggled up with a blanket of sampled textures.” available at illegalart.bandcamp.com—pay whatever for our entire archive as we upload throughout the remainder of 2026. #illegalartlabelarchive

Gregg Gillis was a biomedical engineering undergrad when Napster turned the history of recorded music into a free playground. As Girl Talk, his first two albums were filled with samples of famous pop and rap songs, but Gillis intentionally destroyed them, transforming the original tracks into disjointed, abrasive blurs. ‘Night Ripper,’ which turns 20 years old this weekend, is disjointed, but it’s not abrasive. On the album that made him indie-famous, Gillis took the catchiest parts from instantly familiar tunes, arranging the collage in ways that made you want to hear the original tracks. While his earlier records were artistic defacements, ‘Night Ripper’ celebrated the hundreds of songs that Gillis crushed together. For decades, musicians had been repurposing old recordings into new songs — Grandmaster Flash, Negativland, “Pump Up The Volume” — but Girl Talk’s LP arrived a few years into the exciting new mutation of this tradition that was the bootleg, or the mash-up. ‘Night Ripper’ is a work of great affection. You can tell Gillis loved the crushed velvet synths of Fleetwood Mac’s “Little Lies” intro, for instance, even when he ripped that intro out of its context and put the 69 Boyz bellowing dance instructions over it. Unlike some of his contemporaries (Richard X, Hollertronix, Danger Mouse) Girl Talk didn’t shape his samples into a unified aesthetic. His aesthetic was everything, all at once. There was no sense of cooler-than-thou curation, either. While the artists he sampled included then-ascendant cool-kid favorites like M.I.A. and LCD Soundsystem, Gillis heaved their tracks into the same wood chipper as Dem Franchize Boyz and Weezer and Hall & Oates. Nothing got any more canonical weight than anything else. Gillis knew ‘Night Ripper’ was a copyright violation party and released it, on MP3s and CD, via the anonymously run label Illegal Art. They planned a fair use legal defense, but nobody sued. Somehow, the album is now on streaming services. Girl Talk will release a new EP on Illegal Art later this year — the label just announced its relaunch after going on hiatus in 2012. 
[📝: Tom Breihan, 📷: Illegal Art, Tom Purves] #GirlTalk #mashup #2000s

. use code bcfriday for 10% off Myth Math vinyl or digital illegalart.bandcamp.com

. Deep Down cover art by Joji Koyama @jojikoyama Joji created artwork for the Tongues vinyl EP along with an image for each song vinyl preorder link in bio

. lead single from the forthcoming Tongues EP July 10th on Illegal Art VINYL/STREAMING link in bio VIDEO CREDITS Illustration by Thu Tran @thu_tran__ 3D Animation by Andrew Strasser @pixelmozart

... excerpt from Plunderphonics ch 5: Fair Use, Fair Play: Girl Talk v. The World @331.3books @negativlandland