{"id":2460483,"date":"2026-06-15T16:26:49","date_gmt":"2026-06-15T16:26:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/?p=2460483"},"modified":"2026-06-15T16:26:49","modified_gmt":"2026-06-15T16:26:49","slug":"father-dionysios-tabakiss-drone-metal-debut","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/father-dionysios-tabakiss-drone-metal-debut\/","title":{"rendered":"Father Dionysios Tabakis\u2019s Drone Metal Debut"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><\/p>\n<div data-testid=\"companionColumn-0\">\n<div class=\"css-53u6y8\">\n<p class=\"css-140ip4z e1me5xab0\">Nothing about Dionysios Tabakis\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-140ip4z e1me5xab0\">His debut album, \u201c<a rel=\"nofollow\" target=\"_blank\" class=\"css-yywogo\" href=\"https:\/\/heatcrimes.bandcamp.com\/album\/paradise-metal\" title=\"\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\">Paradise Metal<\/a>,\u201d 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 \u2014 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.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-140ip4z e1me5xab0\">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\u2019s profile with <a rel=\"nofollow\" target=\"_blank\" class=\"css-yywogo\" href=\"https:\/\/8cmbykf0.r.us-east-1.awstrack.me\/L0\/https:%2F%2Fpitchfork.com%2Freviews%2Falbums%2Ffather-dionysios-tabakis-paradise-metal%2F\/1\/0100019eacfa9625-b11969a0-cc8a-40c6-8289-a48dab478a73-000000\/ZggTG88sO9O1WOCZnhGxPwzoIFI=473\" title=\"\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\">a glowing review<\/a>, saying it deserved to be plucked from \u201cdollar-bin obscurity for at least a chuckle, maybe an epiphany.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<aside class=\"css-ew4tgv\" aria-label=\"companion column\"\/><\/div>\n<div data-testid=\"companionColumn-1\">\n<div class=\"css-53u6y8\">\n<p class=\"css-140ip4z e1me5xab0\">Demand for physical copies of \u201cParadise Metal\u201d 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.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<aside class=\"css-ew4tgv\" aria-label=\"companion column\"\/><\/div>\n<div data-testid=\"companionColumn-2\">\n<div class=\"css-53u6y8\">\n<p class=\"css-140ip4z e1me5xab0\">\u201cPeople have been saying so many nice things \u2014 it\u2019s as if I\u2019m paying them to do it,\u201d 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. \u201cI don\u2019t consider myself a particularly talented musician,\u201d he added. \u201cI\u2019m just doing what I love, what feels meaningful.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-140ip4z e1me5xab0\">Tabakis rarely travels outside Nafplio and has never been farther abroad than Turkey. But this September, he will be performing at <a rel=\"nofollow\" target=\"_blank\" class=\"css-yywogo\" href=\"https:\/\/makingtimeisrad.com\/\" title=\"\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\">Making Time festival<\/a> in Philadelphia, sharing the bill with a big-name alternative and electronic acts like Kim Gordon, Theo Parrish and Bicep. \u201cI\u2019m in big trouble,\u201d he said with a laugh. \u201cI\u2019ve never actually played a concert before.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-140ip4z e1me5xab0\">The only other person who has heard him play live, Tabakis said, is his wife, Fotini \u2014 who regularly tidies away his instruments and asks him to stop making so much noise.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<aside class=\"css-ew4tgv\" aria-label=\"companion column\"\/><\/div>\n<div data-testid=\"companionColumn-3\">\n<div class=\"css-53u6y8\">\n<p class=\"css-140ip4z e1me5xab0\">Among Tabakis\u2019s prized possessions is a fretless electric guitar, which is crucial to the sound of \u201cParadise Metal.\u201d The instrument, Tabakis explained, allows him to bend into pitches that standard Western instruments can\u2019t produce and hit the microtones used in Greek Orthodox liturgical music.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<aside class=\"css-ew4tgv\" aria-label=\"companion column\"\/><\/div>\n<div data-testid=\"companionColumn-4\">\n<div class=\"css-53u6y8\">\n<p class=\"css-140ip4z e1me5xab0\">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).<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-140ip4z e1me5xab0\">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.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-140ip4z e1me5xab0\">\u201cWe were very poor, but we were always surrounded by music and refugees singing songs from the East,\u201d Tabakis said of his childhood. \u201cI\u2019ve always felt, deep down, that my homeland is in the East.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<aside class=\"css-ew4tgv\" aria-label=\"companion column\"\/><\/div>\n<div data-testid=\"companionColumn-5\">\n<div class=\"css-53u6y8\">\n<p class=\"css-140ip4z e1me5xab0\">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.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-140ip4z e1me5xab0\">Making music has been a pastime throughout his life, Tabakis said, and in 2012 he started <a rel=\"nofollow\" target=\"_blank\" class=\"css-yywogo\" href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/channel\/UC65m8pZ36z3K30easXxN1sA\" title=\"\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\">a YouTube channel<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<aside class=\"css-ew4tgv\" aria-label=\"companion column\"\/><\/div>\n<div data-testid=\"companionColumn-6\">\n<div class=\"css-53u6y8\">\n<p class=\"css-140ip4z e1me5xab0\">It was on YouTube that Nikolas Rafael, the founder of the Elhellhel label, discovered Tabakis while down a rabbit hole searching for musical oddities. \u201cI went into the channel, and I thought: \u2018This is amazing. This needs to be a record,\u2019\u201d Rafael said.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-140ip4z e1me5xab0\">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.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-140ip4z e1me5xab0\">Rafael said it was the sheer strangeness of \u201cParadise Metal\u201d that has driven its success. \u201cThere\u2019s a kind of lighthearted naivet\u00e9 to Father Dionysios\u2019 work,\u201d he said. \u201cHe\u2019s created something very odd, and distinctly spiritual, that doesn\u2019t sound like anything that\u2019s come before it.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-140ip4z e1me5xab0\">In the interview, Tabakis was vaguely bemused \u2014 but ultimately extremely pleased \u2014 by the record\u2019s success. He was touched by the broad range of people who had connected with it, he said. \u201cI just want to create a big mix of everything,\u201d he added: \u201cHeaven and Earth, West and East, today and the past.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<aside class=\"css-ew4tgv\" aria-label=\"companion column\"\/><\/div>\n<p><em> \u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n<p><em> \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.nytimes.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Nothing about Dionysios Tabakis\u2019s 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 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2460484,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25179],"tags":[356577,483959,350861,21800,348076,483958],"class_list":["post-2460483","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-music","tag-content-type-personal-profile","tag-dionysios","tag-greece","tag-music","tag-musical-instruments","tag-tabakis"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/Father-Dionysios-Tabakiss-Drone-Metal-Debut.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2460483","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2460483"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2460483\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2460485,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2460483\/revisions\/2460485"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2460484"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2460483"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2460483"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2460483"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}