Exactly ten years ago, Mora Prokaza released their first album: an unsurprising black metal that the Belarusians Farmakon and Isvind performed with respect for the codes of the genre, without genius but without anything shameful either. Then, little by little, their sound gained in strangeness and personality to completely switch with the album By Chance in 2020 and mutate into an avant-garde hybrid beast between trap and black metal, but not only, as we come across a bunch of surprising instruments in this context. The duo have just signed with Dark Terror Temple and released a new big EP/small album, Crawling Through Time, barely a year after the Autumnal EP.
Those who already have been initiated will not be disoriented by I Breathe. The others will wonder what they've been plunged into: madness and creativity run riot as we find all the ingredients we love in Mora Prokaza. There's the chanted barking and growling, the accordion, the brass, the mix of almost grotesque theatricality, hallucinatory melancholy and flashy outrageousness. Farmakon roars and declaims, a monstrous narrator and facetious guide who enjoys losing us in this dark, unpredictable universe. Others have already mixed trap and black metal (Ghostemane for the most famous, or recently CBZK seduced us with their Dybuctwo EP). However, Mora Prokaza's expressivity and use of such a wide range of instruments perhaps brings it closer to Igorrr's approach, with its taste for extravagance, its ogre's appetite for “unnatural” experiments, crossed with the black metal of Pensées Nocturnes, where circus music and accordions crash in and sow dissonance. Except that Mora Prokaza is no laughing matter.
Crawling Through Time is dirty. That's down to the production, of course, but also the atmosphere and the demonic vocals. It's not a party album: listen to the menace hovering in the haze of guitars at the start of Snail, before Farmakon's borborygms settle into a hypnotic beat and choirs begin to incant. Brass wails and spreads its spleen in the shadows of The Betrayer, while heavy bass stuns us, Out of the East traps us under its haunted marquee and a few crows scream in the distance, echoes of the cadaverous singer's desiccated croaks.
Mora Prokaza is for those in search of discovery, strangeness, dark atmospheres both aggressive and melancholy, for anyone dreaming of new nightmares, for those who don't care about labels. Tired of transgressive music that wisely respects codes? Then this is for you. You want to hear banjo, piano and accordion in a dark atmosphere and trap music chanted by a Belarusian demon? So are we! Crawling Through Time is a new expression of Mora Prokaza's singularity, an opaque, mutant thing that will irritate purists who are a little uptight and bored, but will greatly amuse those who find themselves in the monster-patchwork of mad scientists.
