Jaime Brooks, who for the last few years has been putting out music as Default Genders, is reviving her old project Elite Gymnastics. Next week, Elite Gymnastics is playing their first show in nearly 9 years — a virtual fundraiser for the label Quiet Year Records — where they’ll perform new music from their official debut album that’s in the works. Brooks recently posted on Tumblr explaining what happened with Elite Gymnastics and where the project will go from here.

Elite Gymnastics, which was a collaboration between Brooks and Josh Clancy, released a whole lot of EPs and remixes between 2009 and 2013 — we named them one of our Best New Bands Of 2011. Their ambitious approach involved a lot of samples, which was fine in the early days of MP3 sharing but is less feasible in a streaming-focused music environment. (Look no further than their still-excellent remix of Korallreven’s “Sa Sa Samoa,” which samples Whitney Houston.) As Brooks explains in her post:

Though MP3 file-sharing culture and file transfer sites like MediaFire and MegaUpload allowed anyone to distribute music freely across the world via the internet, it was still pretty difficult to get people to pay you for it. I think it was for this reason that a lot of internet music back then featured a lot of sampling. A lot of artists’ first forays into the world of DAWs and production took the form of mash-ups, bootleg remixes, and DJ mixes. Artists like Animal Collective, MIA, Kanye West, and Daft Punk for whom sampling was a pillar of their creative process were extremely influential. Elite Gymnastics was no exception – the first song of ours to gain traction online was “IS THIS ON ME?” which made no attempt to hide the fact that it heavily sampled Faye Wong’s “EYES ON ME.” The fact that it was so difficult to make money off MP3s pushed people to make different creative decisions than they would have otherwise. It was sort of a free-for-all.

Eventually, all of this started to change. The major labels started getting a lot more aggressive about trying to destroy MP3 file-sharing culture. Platforms like MegaUpload were raided and taken offline. The replacements that sprung up to replace them were increasingly infested with ads and malware. Corporate platforms like YouTube and SoundCloud adopted Content ID filters to prevent the proliferation of copyrighted music there. Blogs and private torrent trackers being taken down meant thousands of hours of labor were wiped out in an instant. Some of the best archives of the history of recorded music ever created were destroyed without hesitation. Even the most devoted participants lost the will to keep repairing and re-making the stuff that cops and record companies kept obliterating.

There’s a whole lot more explanation where that came from, which you can check out here. Long story short is that Brooks is bringing back Elite Gymnastics, though Clancy is no longer involved. (He left the group back in 2012 shortly before it disbanded; apparently, they were going to reunite together but he left the project “recently.”) The old Elite Gymnastics material is not coming to streaming services, but Brooks is working on the project’s proper debut full-length. As she says:

So, I am currently working on the first Elite Gymnastics album. If you were following my stuff as Default Genders, you may have noticed me posting demos on my SoundCloud page from 2015-2018 that were all eventually reworked into the album MAIN POP GIRL 2019. The album I am making is taking that approach to all the old EG songs, including some unreleased stuff. I’m collaborating with others on some songs and I honestly feel like it has resulted in some of the best and most exciting music I have ever been involved with. It is a drastic reinvention, but iteration and reinvention have always been a big part of what I do. I want to make something that feels like the culmination of everything that came before, and so far, I think I’m succeeding.

Sounds exciting! Some of that new material will debut on 6/4 as part of that virtual fundraiser.