DJ Quickie Mart comes from a family of lawyers. Lucky for him, he stumbled upon turntables when he was a teenager, and he’s never had to come up with a backup plan.

Quickie Mart’s new album, Brain Salad Surgery (downloadable here), is an homage to the mashup DJs he’s looked up to for years. “[DJ] Z-Trip and DJ P, they’re the godfathers of the mashup,” he says. “Mashup gurus don’t get the respect they should. Everyone is pretty much trying to copy it now. It came a long way, but now there so many computer softwares, average Joes can do it. Brain Salad Surgery – this is a DJ’s work.”

The “average Joe” in question when it comes to mashups seems to be Girl Talk, whose Night Ripper and Feed the Animals have caused a sensation by joining together hundreds of snippets of uncleared samples into lengthy, ecstatic mixes. Brain Salad Surgery is Quickie Mart’s answer to him. “I’ve been making mashups for years, before he was even on the scene. He crossed some lines as far as putting stuff together,” Quickie Mart says, referring to the practice of creating mashups in programs like Ableton. “It takes more skill than just to have a computer program sync two tracks automatically.” 

Quickie Mart mixed his album entirely from commercially released records, with nothing added, something he says your average Girl Talk fan wouldn’t understand. “That’s the difference between me and laptop DJs,” he says. “I consider myself a hip-hop turntablist. Most of what you hear is done with turntables and multi-track. Pushing a space bar on a computer isn’t difficult,” which is why playing live shows isn’t easy.

Girl Talk is simply a great producer, Quickie Mart says. “You think DJs are trying to be like Girl Talk? Girl Talk is trying to be like us DJs.”