I reviewed this for The Wire a couple of issues back.
Father Dionysios Tabakis
Paradise Metal
Heat Crimes DL/LP/MC Religious music poses tough questions for the listener. Is it music first, or an act of religious devotion? If it's the latter, what is an unbeliever doing listening to it? Isn't that disrespectful? Back in the 1990s, fans of underground culture used to circulate recordings of cults singing songs devoted to their self-appointed guru/messiahs. The joke got a lot less funny when so many of those groups turned out to be led by abusers, or committed mass suicide.
But even when one is listening with respect and admiration - like when rock fans were blown away by Aretha Franklin's 1972 gospel album Amazing Grace, or when Western audiences discovered Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan's ecstatic Sufi hymns in the 1980s/90s, or Ethiopian nun Emahoy Tsegué Maryam Guèbrou's gospel jazz piano compositions, or Alice Coltrane's devotional tapes, originally only meant to be heard by the pilgrims to her California ashram (many of whom were singing and clapping on those tapes themselves) - there's always a sense of being on the outside looking in. The effect is even stronger when a racial/ethnic element comes into play, with white audiences embracing Gnawa music or The Master Musicians Of Jajouka. Even European classical music made with an explicitly religious purpose, like Arvo Pärt's Tabula Rasa or Sergei Rachmaninoff's All-Night Vigil, can pierce the heart of even the most rigorous atheist with its beauty, while still causing one to feel like an eavesdropper.
Metal's relationship to spirituality is often misunderstood. Let's state it openly: Black Sabbath, credited with inventing the genre, were a Christian band. As Lester Bangs put it in a two-part 1972 feature, "They are probably the first truly Catholic rock group, or the first group to completely immerse themselves in the Fall and Redemption: the traditional Christian dualism which asserts that if you don't walk in the light of the Lord then Satan is certainly pulling your strings, and a bad end can be expected, is even imminent... the prevailing mood is a medieval sense of supernatural powers moving in to snatch the unwary soul and cast it into eternal bondage." There is no honest reading of their lyrics that casts doubt on this conclusion. Of course, they were mischaracterised as Satanic for their entire existence.
Meanwhile, death metal bands like Deicide, Incantation and Immolation embraced blasphemy and Satanism in their lyrics, seemingly without realising they were playing the game on Christianity's territory by even acknowledging the Church as a worthy adversary. Bands like Venom and Mercyful Fate, on the other hand, seemed to treat Satanism as a libertine philosophy rather than a religion. Artists from other religious traditions have understood and embraced the power of riffs and the transcendental joy of headbanging; there are plenty of metal bands from Hindu, Muslim, even Buddhist countries. Sunn O))), metal's most notable ambassadors to the avant garde, have at times made spiritual music. Their 2015 album Kannon nodded to Buddhism; as they said in the sleevenotes, "The literal representation of Kannon is as an aspect of Buddha: specifically 'goddess of mercy' or 'Perceiving the Sounds (or Cries) of the World'. She is also sometimes commonly known as the Guanyin Bodhisattva amongst a plurality of other forms."
Additionally, Sunn O)))'s 2009 album Monoliths & Dimensions seemed to draw from Arvo Pärt in its compositional structures, incorporated choirs on certain tracks and ended with "Alice", a 16-plus minute piece dedicated to Alice Coltrane.
Father Dionysios Tabakis is an Orthodox priest in Nafplio, the first capital city of modern Greece; he plays numerous traditional stringed instruments including oud, tanbur and more. Some of those instruments are featured on his debut album Paradise Metal but the majority of the tracks are played on electric guitar, including two featuring a perdesiz or fretless guitar. The title of the first of the perdesiz pieces translates to "Electric Hymns First Eothen". Like most of the music here, it consists of bent, distorted riffs using non-Western scales. Other pieces carry dedications to the Virgin Mary or bear simple titles like "Light, Merry And Electric".
But it's not all eerie, devotional guitar music. The album opens with "Relaxation Music With Tanbur", a piece seemingly recorded outside, as we hear birdsong and running water (there are parallels here with Sunn O)))'s recent self-titled album, which similarly incorporates sounds from nature). Some tracks feature Tabakis singing over programmed techno beats, and at one point he delivers what seems to be a religious rap.
Although Tabakis's guitar melodies are built from Byzantine scales and intervals, the distorted sound of his guitar brings to mind Azonic, the 1990s solo project of Blind Idiot God guitarist Andy Hawkins. On the last two tracks, "Hail, Virgin Sumela" and "Rose Of The Soul", Evgenia Symela Armeni sings in a traditional Orthodox psaltic style.
These are home recordings, but hardly lo-fi demos; Tabakis is adept at mixing and employs reverb judiciously. The result is a fascinating example of modern spiritual music.
― wipes chooser (unperson), Wednesday, 19 August 2026 23:47 (three weeks ago)