It seems like an ages ago when Gregg Gillis was a biomedical engineer moonlighting as a mixmaster. Over the last year and a half, the success of Night Ripper turned Gillis's marathon weekend shows (and tired Monday mornings) into a full-time position as the indie realm's preeminent mashup artiste. Yesterday Night Ripper's followup Feed The Animals was made available for download, and judging from the comments, it seems like a bunch of you did, indeed, download and, more importantly, enjoy it. The response was so overwhelmingly positive, we thought it would be fun (and celebratory) to drop Gregg Gillis a line asking him about Feed The Animals' first day.
STEREOGUM: We posted the link to the download this morning and our readers went crazy. People are even paying for it, which is cool.
GREGG GILLIS: Awesome, man, today was very exciting. I've just been putting this album together for two years so it's cool to see how people get down with it.
STEREOGUM: How many downloads so far?
GG: I'm not totally sure on this. The guys at Illegal Art have been insanely busy today, trying to deal with all the activity and preventing a crash on the site, so I haven't heard.
STEREOGUM: What kind of response have you received?
GG: I only had one guy on my MySpace talking shit, so that was cool. Everyone else was pumped, which is a relief, since I've been at work on this thing forever. I really wanted to take things up a notch from Night Ripper, and most people seemed to think that it is a more accomplished work.
STEREOGUM: You must be somewhat impressed how quickly the fans did the Feed The Animal Wiki. Had you seen that?
GG: Yeah, it went up immediately! I started uploading tracks to my MySpace at around 5:00 AM, and it seemed like the Wikipedia started before I was even finished. Everything seems accurate so far, but it's missing a ton of the small details. The physical release is going to include a list of every song used as source material...
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People always overlook the little things. Speaking of the physical release, Feed The Animals is out 9/23 on CD via Illegal Art and on double vinyl via Wham City Records in the fall. Thanks and congrats, Gregg.
[Photo by Christos Schizas]
