NEW YORK – The New York Times’ headline for Hester Underhill’s article ‘From the Altar to the Alt-Scene: A Greek Priest’s Drone Metal Debut’ prompts double takes, and fascination. Efforts to recall a similar article in the Orthodox Observer come up empty.
Indeed, Underhill notes: “Nothing about Dionysios Tabakis’s appearance would suggest that he is a rising star of the experimental music scene. He is a 53-year-old Orthodox priest with a long white beard and flowing black robes, and has spent nearly three decades serving the same church in Nafplio, Greece. Yet beyond the church walls, Tabakis has found an unlikely following among hipster music aficionados.”
The article further explains: “His debut album, ‘Paradise Metal’, is a 32-minute, reverb-heavy flow of hypnotic Byzantine chants and wavering electric guitar, interwoven with pulsating electronic beats, birdsong and the twanging of traditional folk instruments. As its title suggests, it brings together the sacred and the alternative – although sonically it bears little resemblance to classic metal. Instead, it occupies a singular territory between Orthodox liturgical music, drone-inflected doom metal and hazy ambient.”
The album was recently released in a small edition of 150 cassettes, “and word spread like wildfire across music blogs and social media. The influential music website Pitchfork boosted the album’s profile with a glowing review, saying it deserved to be plucked from ‘dollar-bin obscurity for at least a chuckle, maybe an epiphany,’ the article says, adding that “demand for physical copies of Paradise Metal is now so great that Elhellhel and Heat Crimes, the Greek labels that collaborated on its release, are pressing it as an LP for a rerelease later this summer.”
Not everyone is a fan: His wife, Fotini, the only other person who has heard him play live, regularly tidies away his instruments and asks him to stop making so much noise,” though the article adds that Tabkis said: “People have been saying so many nice things – it’s as if I’m paying them to do it.”
The interview took place at his church, “a 15th-century landmark with gilded icons crowding the walls and saints gazing down from an elaborately painted ceiling.” He told Underhill: “I don’t consider myself a particularly talented musician,” he added. “I’m just doing what I love, what feels meaningful.”
The Times reveals that “Tabakis rarely travels outside Nafplio and has never been farther abroad than Turkey. But this September, he will be performing at Making Time festival in Philadelphia, sharing the bill with a big-name alternative and electronic acts like Kim Gordon, Theo Parrish and Bicep.”
“I’m in big trouble,” he said with a laugh. “I’ve never actually played a concert before.”
He was raised in Piraeus but his family are refugees from the burning of Smyrna. “We were very poor, but we were always surrounded by music and refugees singing songs from the East…I’ve always felt, deep down, that my homeland is in the East.”
“Tabakis, who was raised in a deeply religious household, said he had known by high school that his future lay in the church,” the article noted, but music was always a vital part of his life. “Among Tabakis’s prized possessions is a fretless electric guitar, which is crucial to the sound of ‘Paradise Metal’. The instrument, Tabakis explained, allows him to bend into pitches that standard Western instruments can’t produce and hit the microtones used in Greek Orthodox liturgical music,” according to The Times, which added that he has also mixed in the sounds of Asia Minor.
In 2012 he started a YouTube channel and “it was on YouTube that Nikolas Rafael, the founder of the Elhellhel label, discovered Tabakis while down a rabbit hole searching for musical oddities” the article noted. “I went into the channel, and I thought: ‘This is amazing. This needs to be a record,’” Rafael said.
Rafael says it was the sheer strangeness of Paradise Metal that has driven its success. “There’s a kind of lighthearted naiveté to Father Dionysios’ work…He’s created something very odd, and distinctly spiritual, that doesn’t sound like anything that’s come before it.”
Tabakis explains: “I just want to create a big mix of everything, Heaven and Earth, West and East, today and the past.”
Material from the New York Times was used in this report.
