ORIGINAL RELEASE DATE: NOVEMBER 15TH 2010


All Day was the first record I heard by Girl Talk, and it has left a pretty mediocre impression on someone who was always intrigued by the potential of sampling and mixing in music. Since I Left You by The Avalanches is one of my favourite records of the past ten years and others such as …..Endtroducing by DJ Shadow inspire more respect for their influence than something I desire to hear over and over. The beautiful thing about this wave of mass sampling, particularly with Since I Left You, was the way in which obscure and often forgotten original songs were thrown together in a hodge-podge that made absolutely no sense other than the way the music flowed. The segue between Flight Tonight and Close To You, for example, is not only pop perfection but sounds like it was made to fit this specific tempo and conjuncture of bubbling activity on the record as a whole. What consistently amazes about hearing the whole thing in sequence is how thousands of samples came together so harmoniously and how it feels like something you have heard before when, in fact, you probably haven’t.


Simon Reynolds (in Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction To Its Own Past) highlights the idea of sampling, suggesting that the idea of mash-ups (a term Gregg Gillis has rejected to acknowledge) always work best with material we already know and love, or at least recognise. For this reason alone, All Day should be a triumph but instead results in an awkward reconfiguration, sampling everything from Arcade Fire and Beastie Boys to Usher and The Ramones (a complete list of all 372 samples can be found here). Indeed, these are hits we all recognise. Moreover, these are the kind of crossover hits that have proven to straddle a number of cultures and scenes. For example, someone who adores OutKast, Missy Elliott and Jay-Z - all pioneers at some point in their careers, but perhaps not anymore - may very well appreciate the incorporation of Portishead’s Sour Times into the mix. So why does it feel like the world’s biggest jigsaw puzzle assembled in under five minutes?


A collection of samples you’ve never heard before ensures you’re not always aware where one ends and the other begins, but with a vague idea of their movement from one to the next. All Day is littered with samples that have come to define the very disparate range of genres that it is made up of, resulting in a mix of punk with rap and R&B with dance that feels forced together more often than it displays a deft fluidity. Unlike Gillis’ previous release Feed The Animals, which was thrilling to experience merely for cramming so many samples into as little time as possible and feeling more like an exercise in indulgence as much as a challenge to cohere, All Day utilises samples which so often outstay their welcome. One feels that Gillis is trying to establish these (at times) wildly differing hit singles by threading them together with a momentum that satisfies the core of each sample. Some of the longer samples persist for more than sixty seconds and soon begin to drag on way beyond their welcome. On the other hand, solid gold anthems such as Beyoncé’s Single Ladies inspire a sense of joy and instant familiarity but end way too soon. As is all too often the case with All Day, rhythms are established and well-known hooks are placed atop well-known basslines, but these familiarities are quickly replaced by an aimless disconnect; the result is frequently haphazard.


Gillis is clearly a lover of all music and his knowledge and variation of it is very impressive, but after seventy one minutes the whole process feels punctured beyond repair. All Day was available as a free download to anyone who wanted it, popping up on Illegal Art’s website with no prior warning. It’s difficult to know what to make of a record that is “intended to be heard as a whole” yet was divided into twelve tracks “only for easier navigation,” somehow betraying the whole sense of (dis)continuity and its subsequent cut/paste aspect at work here by the very aspect of division. Just by inserting breaks and establishing a start and an end to each track makes me think that it’s easier to locate a particular sample that one may be searching for, discrediting the process of flow and surprise within sampling altogether. As a result it feels trivial to mention specific songs here, since their titles relate not to the samples found within, nor differentiate from the others in the way the music is sampled. It appears the idea behind All Day is to not only forget about our troubles and worries but one’s reason and logic also. Turn the lights down and dance mindlessly, as it were. This is the way mass consumption of music works in the present, but it seldom results in authenticity. The reasoning behind Gillis’ intentions are good and his desire to replicate effectively should be commended. It’s just a shame that All Day fails to ignite something new out of that which has come before. A year after its release highlights this shambles even more painfully.