![]() "Little Things" also gains distinction with its vocal hung between huge, skeletal pulses and silvery curls of ambiance. The original version of "Here, in Heaven" sounds flat compared to the second, a yawning chasm that evokes the ambient dub of Brock Van Wey. It actually improves some of the original mixes by clearing out the dense thatching, letting them breathe. That's why RUIN 2- which basically borrows the idea of chopped and screwed remix discs from rap- is more than a supplement. Blurry but lucid is a very tricky sound to nail, and Elite Gymnastics are getting good mileage out of raw energy while they work it out. Besides the frequently inconsequential vocals, the only downside is some murky mixing, with lots of uncompressed clutter. The drums are often taut and frantic, but great floating swaths of texture provide a nebulous weight. The through-line is a pitched, exciting contest between aggressive percussion and emotive melody. ![]() Jungle drums slice through dark, grainy atmospheres flashing with techno synths (" So Close to Paradise"), and the only thing separating throbbing Spacemen 3-style rock ("Little Things") and gentle vintage shoegaze (" Omamori") is the fizzy electro of "Here, in Heaven". It's a rugged, mercurial terrain with heatwaves blasting off it. There's nothing slackened or balmy about it, no pink Christmas lights or plastic palm trees. Whether or not you buy that line, the only chillwave thing about RUIN 1 is how miscellaneous listening habits dissolve in a solution of over-stimulated memory and prodigious sonic options. According to the band, they used chillwave to Trojan Horse these diverse sounds into complacent earbuds. They're comfortable mixing Waka Flocka Flame or Ryuichi Sakamoto, chopping Final Fantasy theme music into Balearic house or tending to ghostly, blackened whirrs. The drum breaks come from jungle and hip-hop, the radiantly smeared textures from shoegaze and drone-rock, the samples from video games. The band's name comes from a song by power electronics pioneers Whitehouse, and noise terrorism is latent in their churning tone and freighted lyrics (which are barely audible but have an evil vibe). Their music is proudly unaffiliated, cobbling together influences that will probably strike older listeners as disparate and younger ones as perfectly concordant. James Brooks and Josh Clancy live in Minneapolis, but this tells us little about them- the Internet is their habitat, not a conduit. ![]() The production duo Elite Gymnastics is a perfect example of this diaspora of younger musicians.
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