THE COACHELLA FESTIVAL

On the opening 15 seconds of “In Step,” a track from Girl Talk’s latest album, “Feed the Animals,” Gregg Gillis, the male musician who works under the unusual moniker, crosses the bass line from Roy Orbison’s “You Got It” with the vocal line of Drama’s “Left, Right, Left” and adds in a few lines of looped kick drum from Jermaine Stewart’s “We Don’t Have to Take Our Clothes Off.” By the end of the song, he’s sampled Fergie, Michael Jackson, the Beach Boys and a dozen other artists.

It’s difficult to imagine what it would cost for the licenses to use that material -- Gillis certainly can’t. He’s one of free culture’s colorful icons, and the title of his most recent full-length collection captures his general attitude toward the sorts of authority figures that worry about copyright law. He willfully ignores the rules and is perfectly comfortable rattling cages.

Of the 322 samples he deploys on “Feed,” some are just a beat or two, others clip along for half a minute. Almost all are recognizable top 40 songs, and precisely none is used with the copyright owner’s permission.

Since 2006, Gillis, who has no formal music training, has released two popular albums, received considerable media attention and played hundreds of shows around the country, including major gatherings like Lollapalooza and the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, where he’ll perform for the second time on Friday. But he’s managed to avoid legal skirmishes over artistic and intellectual property.

“It’s three years later so it’s not something I can lose sleep over every night,” he said on the phone from his Pennsylvania home. “It’s something I think about and it’s part of the music. It’s implied in all of the music, but at this point we haven’t had any issues.”

Not that it’s much of a legal defense, but publicity is expensive and Gillis is a walking advertisement for the last four decades of pop music: His albums sound like a jukebox gone so haywire that it’s put on five chart-topping records at the same time.

Gillis, 27, quit his job as a biomedical engineer a couple of years ago to compose and perform full time. He said he made about 10% of his income from selling his music online. His label, Illegal Art, is offering “Feed the Animals” for download on its website -- fans can pay any price they would like for the collection.

The rest of his living comes from a grueling performance schedule, where Gillis upends convention by allowing his audience to jump onstage and dance around him; often he’ll be swallowed up in the commotion, only to emerge, shirtless, to swan-dive into the crowd.

He arrives at shows with nothing more than a waterproof laptop that he uses to trigger and loop his vast catalog of samples, like playing an instrument, sort of.

“Gregg is playing your brain,” said filmmaker Brett Gaylor, a friend of Gillis who featured the Pittsburgh-based artist in “RiP,” a new documentary about remix culture. “He’s playing your memories and your emotions. He’s combining a song you made out with a girl to for the first time with a song that was playing when you were driving down the street in your first car.”

Girl Talk’s endless devouring and regurgitation of the pop music lexicon makes him a kind of hero to copyright skeptics like Gaylor -- those who believe that remix and reinterpretation are the main ways culture is generated. The “copyleft” movement decries the U.S. system of copyright as an outmoded framework that enables corporate entities to wall off the most popular works of art and entertainment.

But Gillis doesn’t talk like an evangelist. From his perspective, he’s a composer whose influences are just a bit more obvious than average.

What if you recognized a guitarist playing a sped-up version of a familiar riff, he asked, “and it’s like, that’s referencing the Ramones. But the melody and the way they’re singing might be something slightly different. I don’t see why you can’t actually take the Ramones and chop it up, speed it up and add new drums. That becomes something new of its own.”

Whether Gillis’ original collages of recycled material are truly new is a question without a real answer. If he were taken to court by one of the hundreds of copyright holders whose music he’s using, he’d likely have to argue that his sampling is a “fair use” of those works. But that kind of defense could be tricky, according to Ben Sheff- ner, who has worked as a litigator on behalf of 20th Century Fox and NBC Universal.

Sheffner said courts often consider how a derivative work could affect the market for the original -- and if Gillis doesn’t pay for music that’s supposed to be licensed, why should everyone else?

“He has a considerable amount of skill and creativity,” Sheffner said. “That said, doing [what he’s doing] without a license is walking on very thin ice.”

Of course, one artist’s infringement is another’s homage. On his album “Night Ripper,” Gillis sampled the dreamy opening piano chords of 1992’s “Damn I Wish I Was Your Lover,” by Sophie B. Hawkins.

“When I was writing the song,” Hawkins said from her L.A. recording studio, “just looping those chords on the piano is exactly what I did. I thought he used them beautifully. He’s really an artist, and I felt complimented.”

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