Listen to snow flakes 2022, the debut album from Elite Gymnastics

Back in 2010, Jaime Brooks made some of the blog era’s most exciting electronic music as Elite Gymnastics. Fusing jungle, shoegaze, and samples upon samples from across a vast spectrum of music, Elite Gymnastics made music that still feels timeless and daring (Jaime Brooks wrote a mini-essay last year on the file-sharing culture that allowed bands like Elite Gymnastics to flourish, and how record labels and copyright holders destroyed it. It’s spot on.)

Elite Gymnastics released a handful of EPs — including the Ruin series — and a handful of songs before Josh Clancy, the artist behind the band’s art and visuals, left the group in 2013 after a tumultuous tour. EG was abandoned for Brooks’s solo project Dead Girlfriends (which was changed, after controversy, to Default Genders). Elite Gymnastics was presumed gone forever until last year, when Brooks announced a live fundraiser for Quiet Year Records as well as a debut album. (Josh Clancy initially reunited with Brooks but left last year; Elite Gymnastics currently consists of Brooks and Viri Char.) The album is out today (October 18) on Bandcamp, and it’s called snow flakes 2022.

As Brooks promised last year, snow flakes 2022 reworks old Elite Gymnastics songs. “Minneapolis Belongs To You” becomes “it’s yours” and “So Close To Paradise” becomes “how could you do it?” You’ll also hear new versions of “Omamori” (now a “piano fantasy” performed by Conrad Tao) and “Andreja-4-Ever” (Brooks passes the reins to Chloe Hotline for a standout performance on the new record). To her credit, Brooks isn’t interested in a cut-and-paste revisitation of the Elite Gymnastics sound circa 2011 — her shaggy, experimental pop as Default Genders bleeds into the compositions here and gives them a deep and somewhat bittersweet authenticity. Listen below on Bandcamp.