Paradise Metal: Fr. Dionysius Tabakis and his microtonal Byzantine devotionals

Didn’t know where else to put this so hey, new thread!

https://assets.boomkat.com/spree/products/1053897/large/f1-gb.jpg

From Bandcamp:

Fr. Dionysios Tabakis is a priest of the Orthodox Church. He serves at the Church of Panagitsa in Nafplio, the Nativity of the Theotokos, and records alone, at home.

The music made in that house does not announce itself. It arrives from somewhere older than genre, older than the distinctions we use to organize sound. Tabakis is a musician of the Eastern Mediterranean in the fullest sense: formed in Byzantine theory and practice, fluent on qanun, oud, cümbüş, ney, zurna, Politiki and Pontic lyra, kabak kemane, yali tanbur. The system he works within is Byzantine, not as aesthetic choice or cultural reference, but as logic. The scales, the intervals, the way a note moves toward or away from another: this is the operating system. What emerges is slow, heavy, meditative, drone that carries the mass of stone walls and sustained prayer. It is still Byzantine music.

Two tracks are built around the fretless electric guitar, perdesiz in Turkish, meaning simply: without frets. The fretless instrument is one of the few capable of producing moria, intervals smaller than a semitone, with the exactness the voice has and fixed-pitch instruments do not. Here the guitar does not behave like a guitar. It bends into pitches that Western tuning sealed off centuries ago, moving the way Earth moves in their slowest passages, or the way Scott Walker's later work used sound as weight rather than melody.

On two tracks, Evgenia Symela Armeni sings. Her voice is psaltic, trained in the Orthodox chanting tradition, ψαλτοτράγουδο, chant-song, and it cuts through the drone the way a single candle cuts through a dark nave. Χαίρε Παρθένε Σουμελά, a Pontian hymn to the Theotokos of Soumela. Ρόδον Ψυχής, Rose of the Soul. Both devotional. Both immovable.

https://heatcrimes.bandcamp.com/album/paradise-metal

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aTZTPpcpfRw

here for this

Yay! Don’t know what you’ll make of it but I’ve seen reviews mention the likes of Sir Richard Bishop and Sandy Bull (though neither of these account for the jaunty techno* diversion the album takes halfway through). Either way it’s pretty singular and pleasingly eccentric, and at some moments, deep as fuck. Hope you enjoy! :))

I heard this jackass was kicked out by the Patriarch of Antioch and told never to play in the Roman Empire ever again