Father Dionysios Tabakis – Paradise Metal

Heat Crimes

American music nerds’ fascination with non-American music continues to thrive, as it should. If you heard your buddy from Topeka put out a drone-folk album, you might not bat an eye at it. But when you hear a Grecian priest put out a drone-folk album, something about the faraway nature of that highly specific categorization perks your ears up, which is how this Father Dionysios Tabakis album came on my radar this past weekend. When you consider some of the current trending worldwide artists like Angine De Poitrine from Canada or Masayoshi Takanaka from Japan, it makes some sense why Paradise Metal is already one of the best-selling albums on Bandcamp so shortly after its release.

There’s not quite anything directly or obviously “metal” about this album from the jump, other than the rad guitar Tabakis is pictured holding on the cover. It evokes a similar feeling as Life Metal, the 2019 album by certified metal band Sunn O))), the reigning kings of experimental drone guitar music. Life Metal is an undeniably heavy album, but it’s intentionally shimmering, bright, and antithesizing their usual drab aesthetics. Paradise Metal is similarly meditative and serene, skirting the same metal-adjacent lines that a band like Blood Incantation explores in their more ambient-leaning material. Tabakis captures 32 minutes of music “formed in Byzantine theory and practice, fluent on qanun, oud, cümbüş, ney, zurna, Politiki and Pontic lyra, kabak kemane, yali tanbur.” That’s how his label Heat Crimes’ Bandcamp page describes it, anyway. My understanding of Greek musical tradition is spotty (nonexistent), but what I do understand is that this will certainly be one of the most celebrated left-field albums of the year.

Paradise Metal has a large focus on the guitar work, but does incorporate vocals throughout, like on the fourth track, “Δὸς ἀγκαλιάν, τῆς ἀγάπης πινελιάν!” (“Give Me a Hug, a Touch of Love!”), which begins with a spoken word passage, and the fifth track, “Εἰς τὴν Θεοτόκον μὲ κιθάραν ἄνευ τάστων” (“To The Theotokos With A Guitar Without Frets”), where Tabakis shares his sung voice that rings heavenly over his guitar work, the song’s title referring to a fretless Turkish guitar which, “produc[es] moria, intervals smaller than a semitone, with the exactness the voice has and fixed-pitch instruments do not.” On the album’s longest track, subtitled “Techno Christmas,” Tabakis sings along with a suitably jaunty techno beat, one of the only moments on the album where rhythm is incorporated at all. The second vocalist on the album is Evgenia Symela Armeni, featured on the final two tracks, “Χαῖρε, Παρθένε Σουμελά” (“Rejoice, Virgin Soumela”) and “⁠Ῥόδον Ψυχῆς”(“Rose Of Soul”), and her timbre brings a melodically haunting texture to the album’s closing moments.

I hope that Fr. Dionysios Tabakis, at his still-rocking age of 53, is able to understand and process the fast admiration for his debut album across other parts of the world. The first album recorded by The Dalai Lama, Inner World, was released in the early months of the pandemic, providing a necessary reprieve from the uncertainty and chaos of that time. I believe that Paradise Metal serves the same purpose now, whether you’re a hesher, a noise freak, a spiritual jazz head, or a lo-fi-beats-to-study-and-or-chill-or-relax-to passive listener. That tone is set right from the introduction of “Relaxation Music with Tanbur,” and the rest of the album continues to transport you to the ancient ruins, lost in the sound, content with no direction.