After a ten year hiatus Jaime Brooks revives her Elite Gymnastics (EG) moniker with the group’s debut album, snow flakes 2022, released exclusively on music distribution platform Bandcamp on October 18, 2022. The record reimagines highlights from the EG catalog and true to the band’s early internet ethos, the songs sound completely new.
Originally based in Minneapolis, Elite Gymnastics was a band born out of the file-sharing culture of the early internet. It was formed in 2009 by Josh Clancy and Jaime Brooks. Similarly to the many bands of the late 2000s and early 2010s, they thrived on sampling in a new digital era of communal peer-2-peer music archives. It was a time before digital content sharing was monopolized by sites such as YouTube and before music streaming became ubiquitous. The brief moment when the optimistic possibilities of the internet felt real, right before it was corporatized and promptly consolidated.
Of the 12 songs presented on snow flakes 2022, we have previously heard 11 of them in some form. But it is their dedication to revision and reinterpretation, to the ethos of sampling, that has fueled EG from the start.
Take their breakthrough 2011 compilation. Ruin assembled the songs from their EP of the same name with its sequel, aptly titled Ruin 2. While the compilation runs 11 tracks, 4 of them—“Intro,” “Here, in Heaven,” “Minneapolis Belongs to You,” and “Omamori”—appear on both Side A and Side B in different forms. Their second appearance was distinguished by a woozier sound which rendered them near unrecognizable on first listen. Thankfully, EG were kind enough to mark the latter versions with a blatant “2.”
In 2012 they released sequel EPs Ruin 3 and Ruin 4, inviting a bevy of other artists to create new versions of those same songs, creating an internet community that felt generous and local. The advent of automatic copyright strikes eventually pressured the band and creative tensions resulted in Clancy taking a step back. After a brief stint as a solo project, Elite Gymnastics went silent in 2012. From there, Brooks carried on with her more pop-oriented project, Default Genders.
Elite Gymnastics’ surprise show in June of 2021 signaled their comeback. It was accompanied by a lengthy Tumblr post from Brooks that explained Josh Clancy’s formal departure from the band and promised a new EG album in the sometime future.
After all that, Brooks and a new bandmate, Viri Char, have delivered snow flakes 2022, an album that continues that foundational EG ethos of adjustment, revision, and recreation. Most of the tracks on the new record originate from the Ruin series and EG’s other releases. They re-appear here, transformed. While the songs are based on old material, they still feel new, even when listening to their different iterations side-by-side.
Breakbeats, a foundational element of EG, still dominate this album’s sound. They overlay the emo-tinged sprint of “life trap,” complimenting Brooks’ angsty refrain, “every day I’m in the trap/and every day you’re in the trap with me.” Meanwhile, they punctuate the ending of the otherwise low-key pop confessional “(i always cry at) regenerations.” Brooks’ highly processed voice wraps around the chorus in the last fourth, “sometimes it’s like the world is moving so slow until you open your eyes.” As if responding to her observation, frantic drums suddenly kick in, showcasing the emotional range of the breakbeat and Brooks’ unique ability in wielding it.
The beat on “it’s yours!” is more conventional, but satisfyingly slick in the way the vocals dance around it. A snare hits precisely on the one whenever Brooks repeats, “when I’m dead!” The song is one of many in Jaime Brooks’ oeuvre that utilizes the Amen Break. Its presence here seems especially apt given Elite Gymnastics’ own history and creation ethos.
That ~20 second drum solo—from 1969’s “Amen, Brother” by The Winstons—has helped spawn whole new genres of music; thousands of songs use it as its foundation. EG takes this approach to iteration with greater scope, using the concepts, sounds, and lyrics of their old tracks to create the new ones here.
This iterative method of music creation has been limited by the internet policing that contributed to the dissolution of EG, as well as the sound of the late ‘aughts and early 2010s. Even with EG’s return, they are limited to “sampling” themselves. It makes me wonder about the bounds of creativity under capitalism, about the kind of projects and songs we have lost to copyright takedowns, and how music may have evolved differently over the past decade had the internet not become another playground for billionaires. snow flakes 2022 provides a small snapshot of that timeline.
It is their steadfast adherence to this file-sharing and sampling ethos that makes for such a unique and compelling album. Not only in tracing the decade-long arrival at these versions of these songs, but how Elite Gymnastics have made an album out of, as Brooks puts it, “a past version of the internet that no longer exists.”
It may be alluring to label snow flakes 2022 as a time capsule, a throwback to the late 2000s and early 2010s. But it is more than that. It sounds like a record from a parallel timeline. One where the internet was still made of local communities. More importantly, before streaming services and content delivery platforms severed any potential to make a living wage off one’s art.
It is impressive how Elite Gymnastics have created a record that pulls so heavily from file-sharing culture, but also manages to incorporate the auto-tuned vocals and maximalist elements popularized by queer electronic pioneers throughout the 2010s. In doing so, they eschew the rose-tinted trappings of nostalgia and extrapolate on a bygone era where the internet still felt like a novel opportunity.
Finnegan Bly is an Arts and Culture Writer for The Triton