Father Dionysios Tabakis, a 53-year-old Greek Orthodox priest, has never played music for anyone but his wife—who, he says, routinely asks him to stop making so much noise. That will change in September, when Tabakis performs live for the first time at Philadelphia’s Making Time festival, sharing a bill with Kim Gordon, Bicep, Smerz, and Avalon Emerson.
Tabakis’ debut album Paradise Metal, released on the Heat Crimes label in April, is a devotional microtonal drone work recorded largely on a perdesiz, the fretless Turkish guitar. The cassette-only release found an audience on Bandcamp and drew coverage from Pitchfork and Stereogum, becoming an unlikely word-of-mouth success. The record aligns Byzantine musical tradition with the patient mass of drone metal, a sound matched to Tabakis’ own image—black-robed, white-bearded, serving at the 15th-century Church of Panagia in the coastal city of Nafplio.
“I don’t consider myself a particularly talented musician,” Tabakis told The New York Times in a recent profile. “I’m just doing what I love, what feels meaningful.” Of the upcoming festival date, he laughed that he’s “in big trouble.”
