GIRL TALK

Picture this: a guy wearing sanitised plastic gloves and a freshly pressed lab coat. He's moving between a tray of Petri dishes and a microscope where he's examining DNA. He spends Monday to Friday in the laboratory, working away, earning his keep - until the weekend. Come Friday night he tears off the lab coat, peels off the gloves, jumps a plane to Paris and plays a DJ set to a room of thousands. Once the whirlwind weekend is over, it's back to the lab.

That was Gregg Gillis, otherwise known as Girl Talk, just a few years ago; a molecular engineer with a secret identity (this movie writes itself!) Girl Talk hardly needs an introduction. His latest album Feed The Animals circulated speakers before anyone could question the legals (and for the record, Girl Talk's methods are A-OK by US copyright law). The sample-based artist lifts sound bytes from pop music - yes, all pop music. "To me, there's not good or bad music," says Gregg. "There's just music; it just exists". In the first thirty seconds of 'Like This' he manages to weave samples from Beyonce to James Gang, LL Cool J to The Bangles, and En Vogue to Soul II Soul.

It's 2009 and it's the perfect time for Girl Talk. According to Gregg, we can now listen to pop music without using irony as our defence. He remembers the '90s when we took great pride in finding a band no one else had heard of. We rattled on to others about how 'underground' you and your newfound band apparently were. "I feel that a lot of that attitude went on to dismiss pop", Gregg says, "these days everyone knows about the underground and the mainstream equally, and I think there's so much progressive music coming out of the mainstream."

When Gregg hung up his lab coat and turned to his vast music collection for a new career, he didn't leave his engineering days all behind - his dissection skills and meticulous eye for detail came with him. "When you're doing engineering work you're sitting in front of a computer for eight hours a day, working on the smallest little piece, and then you discover a problem. It's very similar to the way I work with my music. I sit down and begin a slow, meticulous process; I might spend 4 hours working on a two second beat", says Gregg. "I feel like all of my music is about coming up with a method of doing something efficiently. As cold and calculated as that sounds."

Girl Talk will play 9.00-10.00pm on The Little Lonsdale Street Stage at the St Jerome's Laneway Festival.

NO AGE

"Wait. Waaaiiit a second..." Dean Spunt is on the other end of the phone opening an envelope as we chat about his former band, Wives. "Ooh, I am cordially invited to attend the Grammy Nominations ceremony," he says in an uppity accent. He knew this was coming but it's flattering to have proof that his band, No Age, has been nominated for Best Recording Package for their latest album, Nouns. Thankfully, No Age felt like they had something more important on the night of the Grammys. "We'd much prefer to play Laneway Festival." So, instead of enjoying free booze with Katy Perry and Sam Sparro, they're going to be showing Melbourne what they've got.

Dean Spunt and Randy Randall (yes, it's his real name and no, it wasn't inspired by a 1986 WWF wrestling match) make up No Age. During their time in Wives, they discovered that brotherly bond that comes with touring and losing too much money. "I was more into punk rock and he was more into indie rock and experimental music. We eventually put our heads together and found a way to make music that we both liked." Dean remembers a conversation when he was gushing over '70s punk bank Crass and Randy was spilling his love for Captain Beefheart. They realised that they appreciated them, despite the Grand Canyon-sized differences between the artists, for similar reasons. "So we decided we didn't want to play to a style or a genre, we just wanted to play music that we both really, really liked."

In 2006 Dean and Randy released five different record over just one week, under different labels across New York, London and L.A. Sounds a little over the top? It wasn't such a big deal to them. "I just wanted to design five record covers", says Dean. For No Age, this record-releasing spree set a precedent for them to outdo themselves. "Now we just have to keep one-upping ourselves; let's do something cool! No, cooler!" Nouns, their recent album, looks so appealing it deserves a shelf of its own. The 68-page colour booklet of warm, psychedelic imagery comes included in the pastel-pink CD jacket. "In my world, all I really care about is the vinyl record. CDs are pretty worthless at this point, so when we were talking about Nouns with Sub Pop we were like - if we want to make a CD, we want to make a book." Dean might put the vinyl record on a pedestal but that doesn't mean he turns his nose up at downloaded or pirated music: "I think it only makes audiences more into the band - because they'll just come to the shows. I think there's too much pressure placed on buying. The more free stuff, the better. I think it's cool for kids to steal shit."

No Age play at 4.05-4.45pm on the Little Lonsdale Stage at the St Jerome's Laneway Festival.

EL GUINCHO

How does Pablo Diaz-Reixa (El Guincho) feel about Melbourne? "I love it. I really, really love it." He could say that again in his breezy Spanish accent and be picked up for a pro-Melbourne tourism ad in a flash. However, it's hard to think that anywhere on earth could be more beautiful than his hometown, where he made his latest album, Alegranza! The heady combination of afro-funk, pop sampling and tribal overtones whisk you up in a canvas hammock and swings you through palms, ferns and tropical fruits. After three minutes of El Guincho's set-in-paradise anthems you're lowered onto the white sands of the Canary Islands and someone hands you rum.

Pablo's musical career digressed when he played in the hip hop band Los Feriantes; it veered towards a freestyle jam band, Dead Man, and then landed with a thump on the floor tom at Coconot. His success lies with El Guincho, a solo project that has managed to tie in all the sounds of his past. He grew up on the Canary Islands where he studied percussion at the local conservatory where his grandmother taught. While Pablo's grandmother sings classical music, she's a long-time fan of his musical achievements - even if El Guincho is a deliberate aberration from the traditional Tropicalia sounds of home, and instead a playful mess of Krautrock and Detroit techno. Pablo invited his grandmother to WOMAD to see hundreds of listeners lapping up his sunny beats, and she fitted right in.

Pablo has finds his audience mystifying sometimes. El Guincho is most at home at festivals, where he can simultaneously cater to loyal fans and win over strangers. But every time he's taken by surprise. He observes the sea of punters jolting their bodies around as if they'd been possessed by a higher power. Alegranza! was never intended to be the euphoric guaranteed-to-erupt-the-dancefloor album it turned out to be. "People take it as a party record and that's really uplifting, but for me it was a dark moment of my life. Seeing all these people enjoying it as a party record makes me feel happy and weird at the same time."

When he was 17, Pablo listened to lots of Tropicalia, a sound that permeates Barcelona and The Canary Islands. After growing up he intentionally wanted to stray from these sounds. "In Spain I used to play that kind of music to 10 or 20 people and no one wanted to listen to me. So when Alegranza! came out, people started to say 'ah, it's like Tropicalia, it's amazing.'" El Guincho will play St Jerome's Laneway Festival and will shake The Corner Hotel's stage with the musical flavours of Spain. But what's Pablo looking forward to most on his trip to Melbourne? "I'm looking forward to eating scrambled eggs and avocado. I never eat breakfast here. I sleep too much in the morning."

El Guincho will play 7.30-8.30pm on The Red Bull Stage at St Jerome's Laneway Festival.

DAEDELUS

When Daedelus dies - god forbid - he should be cryogenically preserved and exhibited in a museum. He is a veritable snapshot of today's complicated cultural climate. His cravats, waistcoats, and oversized shoe-buckles might suggest he's a time-traveller from the sixteenth century, but once he's up on stage creating experimental dance tracks with unrecognisable instruments and sampled loops, you'll wonder whether he's from the future instead. Despite his otherworldly nature, Daedelus aka Alfred Darlington did not hatch from an egg. Listening to him talk about his parents explains a lot about his general mish-mash of flavours, both musical and stylistic. His mother is a visual artist and his father was an experimental psychologist, "which was kind of an artform - he was like a deranged crackpot genius, but friendlier."

Little Alfred used to rummage through his parents sizeable record collection and pick out a few to play. His unsullied ears were exposed to the pioneers of experimental and electronic music, John Cage and Iannis Xenakis. But Alfred's childhood learning wasn't all modernist composers and Musique Concrete. He used to live next door to a kid whose uncle was George Clinton's manager, and became all too familiar with the thick, sultry bass lines and filthy lyrics of Funkadelic. "It was probably wildly inappropriate for a young child's mind - there's a lot of sexual and drug references but my parents were cool enough to let me listen to the music." Alfred's appetite for new music went through growth spurts like it was going through puberty. One afternoon, trawling through records in a store, he picked up one album that was more expensive than the others. It was an import and it "had a funny picture of the world on the cover." He took it home, placed the record on the turntable and once the needle dropped, the room was filled with romantic strings and the heady compositions of John Berry. "It was a soundtrack for You Only Live Twice. I was transfixed, it blew my mind - kind of like a Eureka moment."

Alfred's own music is so connected to his musical education that his performances are like an audiovisual autobiography. His analogue sound is punctuated with handclaps, enriched with Wagneresque romanticism and revved up with classic pop and hip hop songs. It all comes from his prized tool: the Monome. The Monome - a piece of hardware that would require a schematic diagram to explain - is Alfred's way of tipping his hat to the pioneers of electronic music that he discovered when he was young. "I discourage laptops in performance. They allow so many sound options but there's no other equipment that has more banality associated with it. When you see someone on stage you don't know whether they're playing Solitare, checking their email or doing their taxes."

Daedelus will play 8.30-9.30pm on the Red Bull Stage at The St Jerome's Laneway Festival.