There’s nothing quite like a Girl Talk show. Part whirlwind DJ set, part arena-rock spectacle, part frenzied dance party, Pittsburgh native Gregg Gillis’ (aka Girl Talk) mix sets are events in themselves.

This infamous mash up artist/producer has made a name for himself in a fairly controversial vein of music, taking the work of a plethora of artists before him, from genres all over the map, and creating complexly layered party anthems, that are about as much fun to dance to as they are to listen and try and pick out each artist. His latest album, All Day (which was released as a free download) blows through more than 370 samples in 70 minutes, so my expectations were high for this sold-out Big Day Out sideshow and geez, were they blown away. So far, far away, in fact, that I think this show can be placed in a category on its own.

While Girl Talk normally doesn’t tour with openers, I heard King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard, who I unfortunately missed, took the anticipation level to new heights. I walked in and felt the buzz of excitement and it was when I saw the huge net full of balloons that hung overhead that I knew the Enmore was about to host one of the biggest dance parties it had ever seen. With a tightly-squeezed, super mixed all-ages crowd, everyone was unquestionably ready to party when the lights dimmed for the headlining mash-up DJ.

At 9:45pm on the dot a giant light screen illuminated with Girl Talk’s logo. Sporting his signature sweat suit and headband, he raced out to greet ecstatic fans and quickly hopped behind the table followed by the first beats of the All Day album’s opener Oh No (which includes samples from Black Sabbath’s War Pigs and Ludacris’ Move Bitch.) With a quick snippet of the Ramones classic Hey Ho, Let’s Go into 50 Cent’s In Da Club straight after it had everyone going nuts. This long haired, party animal had made everyone’s’ night already, and it had been about five minutes, if that.

As songs from Girl Talk’s most recent release Let It Out, Jump on Stage, and Get It Get It bled into each other, so did the hour-and-a-half dance-a-thon. Especially when he teased older fans nice and early with a drop of one of his classic mash-ups: Blackstreet’s No Diggity into Kanye West’s Flashing Lights. Dozens of fans joined him onstage, dancing nonstop with confetti cannons, massive balloons, blaring lights and by this stage his crew members had broken out automatic toilet paper rollers that shot streams of TP into the crowd. There was as much of a part up on stage as there was down in the crowd. All of the sudden long clear plastic tubes sprang out into the crowd with confetti flowing inside of the tubes and loud popping noises sent confetti flying intermittently over the masses, it was like being in an episode of Yo Gabba Gabba. Gillis, executed an impressive balance of focused mixing and yelling at the audience yelling: “Sydney how we feeling right now!!??”

One of the highlights of the evening was when he dropped Triple Double which sampled Phoenix’s 1901 into Ludacris’s How Low followed by Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody (wow!). I felt every cell in my body wake up and smile, of course the audience ate it up, forming a mass of bouncing bodies that moved to the swell of familiar songs in semi-new packages.

As the tunes continued, the immense balloons filled with confetti started to drop on the herd and pop open releasing magical goodness; followed by a swarm of colossal plastic pillows covered in bright coloured cases, floating out over everyone’s spirit fingers that reached to the sky. And as the mix of U.G.K’s One Day and Guns ‘n’ Roses’ November Rain simultaneously started to play, the large net of balloons overhead came loose and spilled a waterfall of colours over the elated mass of sweaty happy people.

After exiting briefly Gills came back out to thank everyone for coming proclaiming that coming to Australia was like a vacation for him as he started a freestyle’ encore that finished up with some older cuts, like snippets from Night Ripper, Feed the Animals, and Unstoppable. Gillis weaved in some newer tracks here and there throughout the night by Lil Wayne, The Strokes, Katy Perry and Adele which kept the show from being more than just him onstage pushing the play button.

By the end of the show, Gills was shirtless and barefoot with his dripping long stringy hair sticking to his smiling face looking out at his dizzied out audience. I felt like I had survived a stampede of epic proportions that night as Gillis pulled out all the stops to bring Sydney the ultimate dance party.