MV Weekly: Concrete & Grass, thruoutin, Mr. Graceless

Images of parks fed through Skynet on the fritz, a return to form for one of Beijing’s most (annoyingly) charming bands, and a video recap of last year’s biggest and best festivals – it’s time to dip our toes once again in the pool of music videos including the latest from thruoutin, Mr. Graceless, and Concrete & Grass.

Hey – it’s Mr. Graceless! The wonder boys of Maybe Mars, whose melodic Beatles-esque indie pop made them quite a draw – such a draw that the band eventually left Maybe Mars and have now tagged up with Ruby Eyes Records (under the much bigger Taihe Records) for their sophomore release Midway to the Sun. Groovy I suppose. Their title track gets the music video treatment courtesy of the Geek Shoot Jack team and it’s as tuneful, effortless, and charming as you’d expect from the trio. Not much sun though.

While Split Works’ JUE Festival isn’t returning this year (two years and counting now) we can be assured that the promotion juggernauts aren’t holding back this year as they look to expand beyond Beijing and Shanghai, throw down some dank festivals in China’s new reigning champs, bring over some of the world’s hottest acts, and of course, throw together their latest edition of Concrete & Grass in Shanghai, which I was lucky enough to attend last year. And if it’s anything like that as evident above, we’re in good hands. Keep your ears to the floor for Split Works’ 2017 events – some good ones on the horizon.

Back cataloguing – one of the joys of life. And by joy I mean a constant struggle to not put a gun to your head. We’ve all got to do it at some point though. Local Beijing electronic producer and artist thruoutin, no stranger to LBM, has been steadily putting his eclectic catalogue of sounds on youtube with accompanying videos. Most of the videos act simply (but effectively) as visual backgrounds to the ambient bliss at play – a peaceful park pond view, a peek outside of one’s window – except for this clusterfuck of a computer mainframe eating itself whole (in actuality it’s a shot of Tao Ran Ting Park manipulated beyond recognition) on \’Learn Korean_pdf\’. The noise-based excerpt is from thruoutin’s 2014 split with Torturing Nurse and will be a joy for all ya’ll noise junkies out there.

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