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.
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.
It was first released this past spring 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.”
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.
“People have been saying so many nice things — it’s as if I’m paying them to do it,” Tabakis said in an interview at his church, a 15th-century landmark with gilded icons crowding the walls and saints gazing down from an elaborately painted ceiling. “I don’t consider myself a particularly talented musician,” he added. “I’m just doing what I love, what feels meaningful.”
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.”
The only other person who has heard him play live, Tabakis said, is his wife, Fotini — who regularly tidies away his instruments and asks him to stop making so much noise.
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.
He has also mixed in the sounds of traditional instruments from the Anatolian peninsula, such as the zurna (a bell-shaped horn) and the kabak kemane (a violin-like instrument made from a hollowed-out gourd).
That region has a special resonance for Tabakis. Although he was raised in Piraeus, near Athens, he comes from a family that fled Smyrna, a once-thriving center of Greek life that is now part of Turkey, during the Greco-Turkish War in the 1920s. Hundreds of thousands of Greeks fled across the Aegean Sea at that time to an ancestral homeland where many had never before set foot.
“We were very poor, but we were always surrounded by music and refugees singing songs from the East,” Tabakis said of his childhood. “I’ve always felt, deep down, that my homeland is in the East.”
His household was deeply religious, and he knew by high school that his future lay in the church, Tabakis said. He trained in a seminary before joining the Church of Panagia in Nafplio, where he has stayed for nearly 30 years.
Making music has been a pastime throughout his life, Tabakis said, and in 2012 he started a YouTube channel to share his experiments with a wider audience. Alongside videos of him riffing on his fretless guitar and performing Byzantine chants, he also began testing unlikely genre mash-ups, like reading psalms over hip-hop beats.
It was on YouTube that Nikolas Rafael, the founder of the Elhellhel label, discovered Tabakis while down a rabbit hole searching for musical oddities. “I went into the channel, and I thought: ‘This is amazing. This needs to be a record,’” Rafael said.
Things moved quickly. Two weeks after making contact with Tabakis over email, Rafael had pulled together a selection of YouTube recordings and sent off the mix to be produced on cassette tape, which Elhellhel brought out in collaboration with Heat Crimes.
Rafael said 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 said. “He’s created something very odd, and distinctly spiritual, that doesn’t sound like anything that’s come before it.”
In the interview, Tabakis was vaguely bemused — but ultimately extremely pleased — by the record’s success. He was touched by the broad range of people who had connected with it, he said. “I just want to create a big mix of everything,” he added: “Heaven and Earth, West and East, today and the past.”
