The music people make at home, by themselves, is more likely to be surprising than the sort produced professionally. But even by that standard, an Orthodox priest going wild on the electric guitar stands out.
While that image is responsible for selling Paradise Metal, it doesn’t do justice to the range and depth of Father Dionysios Tabakis’s achievement.
In addition to a fretless eight-string electric guitar, he deploys a variety of traditional instruments from the lands southeast of Europe. This makes sense, given that the liner notes describe him as being “of Asia Minor descent”.
The first track, called “Relaxation Music”, features abundant bird song and the tanbur. In the fourth, he recites a prayer. The seventh, “Techno ἐν Μοναστηρίῳ”, uses electronic beats as a bed for chanting.
In other words, the album’s title is deceptive unless we interpret the word “metal” in its more figurative sense, implying something that goes hard.
What matters isn’t whether the music on Paradise Metal actually conforms to the musical genre, but how it affects listeners.
Although I don’t understand Greek and have very limited acquaintance with the Orthodox faith, the record transports me to a place where the impulse to classify loses its charm.
The eclecticism of this music testifies to Father Tabakis’s conviction—one that is apparently a central tenet of Orthodoxy—that the experience of sound can reach places that words alone cannot.
It’s interesting, then, that the packaging of Paradise Metal threatens to constrain responses to the music.
The photograph of Father Tabakis on the cover underscores the incongruity of his project. He stands stiffly in religious garb, his long white beard making him look older than his 53 years. He holds the fretless, eight-stringed instrument at an acute angle. The white curtain behind him, red roses framing the photograph, and sky-blue background make the record seem like a thrift-store find, something out of step with contemporary design principles.
In short, Paradise Metal looks like the kind of album that the hipsters of my youth used to increase their clout. Discovering strange and obscure culture was what set them apart. Whether it actually moved them was irrelevant.
In the 1980s, before the Internet made access to information exponentially easier, knowledge was power. Before I learned that radio stations were mailed records for free, I marvelled that anyone my age could be so well informed. It felt like magic.
Music, art, and film from the Eastern Bloc were particularly prized back then, because they came from societies where only the state had the resources to promote work effectively. This imbued culture that made it out of communist nations with a unique aura.
I remember my university DJ friends excitedly playing me the early records of the Yugoslavian band Laibach and the compilations released under the name Le Mystère des Voix Bulgares. While my friends may have sincerely loved their sound, what they communicated to me was the thrill of access, as if they were priests privileged to perform arcane rites.
Four decades later, scarcity has lost most of its lustre. Making music that defies commercial expectations is so much easier that millions of people around the world are doing what Father Tabakis has done. And tracking down those homemade records requires only patience and passable internet service.
The result is a paradox, a world where a surfeit of choices makes it harder for unusual culture to gain traction in the marketplace.
That’s why it’s heartening to see that Paradise Metal has somehow managed to make a significant impression despite its obscure origin and unusual packaging. While the reasons for this success may be secular, they come with a whiff of divine intervention.
Father Tabakis doesn’t perceive a contradiction between his day job and his hobby. He draws upon a rich tradition of spiritual music that fuses contemporary aesthetics with timeless convictions, from the Indian music of Ravi Shankar to the gospel of Sister Rosetta Tharpe.
Had a record like this come out in the 1980s, it probably would have been treated as a novelty. Today, when it’s so much easier for listeners to learn who he is and how he feels about his work, that condescending response is less likely.
To my mind, the most important takeaway from Paradise Metal, aside from Tabakis’s belief that his music and faith are inextricably bound together, is that he wants to showcase the importance of the East.
In Western Europe and North America, we tend to forget that the early Christian church was every bit as “Oriental” as Judaism and the Islamic faith that followed in its wake.
Paradise Metal reminds us that the exotic is actually intrinsic.
Photograph courtesy of George Groutas. Published under a Creative Commons license.
