This single was a direct hit in the back of my head in an otherwise silent and moody Monday evening. So what the fuck is this? Let me present you the infernal duo from Minsk, Belarus who calls themselves Mora Prokaza (or the Sea of Leprosy in English).
It’s a mix of trap beats on speed, a great boosting bass line, typical primitive black metal riffs while hordes of rabid dogs are heavily barking, all with an opressive almost studied digital-infused sound. ‚WIMG’ (Where Is My Gun?) is the second single from their up-coming album to be released on Season of Mist next month. Of course I got curious to check out also their debut single ‚Check It’ and to my surprise it was an avantgarde trap black metal song with trumpets and saxophone.
Of course both videos are made in a studied artisanal manner, looking like they are filmed with a smart phone and simply color-corrected with the vista filter, but the different frames and filming-angles prove me wrong, it is more than a cheap trolling band, there is a damn plan behind it!
To put it this way, this is apocalyptic music for the jilted generation, just to quote the title of one famous album of The Prodigy from back to 1994, in the most (un)favorable context. Don’t forget the band is coming from the capital of Belarus, one of the very last neo-stalinist harsh-communist regimes in Europe. I don’t know how it is now, but I remember the grey city of Minsk from back in the days, a disturbing mix of lights in the center and dark suburbs with high blocks of flats built in the typical proletcultist manner. There is definitely a different sense of freedom down there in those hoods, which can be easily described as out-of-control. Mora Prokaza are the children of totalitarianism and their weapons are now the computers, smart phones and, presumably, all types of illegal substances that are so common in the whole ex-soviet underground scene.
Mora Prokaza is one of a kind in 2020, but we had this kind of black metal experimentalists on their own imminent destructive path also in the Norwegian black metal scene back in the 90s, the parias’ from Mysticum, the drugs-destroyed rasta crusty urban black metalheads. They took the test of time, but I suspect Mora Prokaza won’t need 25 years for their music protest to be accepted and embraced by a new generation of fans.
And let’s not forget that bands from the first Finnish wave of Black Metal, now considered cult, were initially received with the same wall of hate and disgust by the TNBM puritans. Yeah, I am talking about Impaled Nazarene and Beherit, just because their music and appearances were so damn different than the typical Northern medieval-sounding romanticism. Back then, there was a French dude who took the bet and signed Impaled Nazarene for one of the longest deals ever known in the history of extreme metal, Herve of Osmose Productions, so it’s not a surprise for me that Michael of Season of Mist, also French, put Mora Prokaza under the wings of his label Season of Mist. Like Osmose three decades ago, I think it’s gonna be a winning bet for Season of Mist!
Follow Mora Prokaza:
https://www.facebook.com/moraprokaza