The Orthodox priest of drone metal, caught between scandal and mysticism: "Better to sin free than be virtuous under oppression"

Father Dionysios Tabakis, the fretless-guitar-playing Greek priest who has taken the experimental scene by storm with his latest album, released in April on Heat Crimes, now finds himself at the center of a storm of controversy, caught between accusations of homophobia and ties to the far right.

His music comes from somewhere else entirely, suspended between Byzantium and a feverish afterhours dream. His "Paradise Metal" (reviewed here) is a journey that turns the sacred into Christmas techno and Byzantine chants into dubstep, as if the liturgy were rebelling against its own solemnity. But behind the strings of his fretless guitar, capable of exploring microintervals that Western music has long forgotten, lies something darker.

The storm was sparked by two 2024 posts on a WordPress blog in which Tabakis called gay marriage (legalized in Greece that same year) a "monstrous sodomitic act" and referred to members of the LGBTQ+ community as "Sodomites." Adding fuel to the fire is a 2013 video showing him performing a blessing for the opening of an office of Golden Dawn, the Greek neo-Nazi organization later declared a criminal group in 2020.

In his public statement, Tabakis doesn't deny any of it, but wraps his words in a veil of almost initiatory ambiguity: "My view on homosexuality is the one the Orthodox Church has held for 2000 years, no more, no less." Then comes a statement that sounds like a mantra worthy of a psychedelic guru: "It's better to sin freely than to be virtuous under oppression."

On the blessing for Golden Dawn, the priest defends himself by explaining that it was an official assignment, just as it would have been for any legally recognized political party at the time. He then adds a detail that sounds like it's straight out of a William Blake poem: "That's why I removed the frets from my guitar, out of my mental need to not be confined within boundaries."

Philadelphia's Making Time festival, where Tabakis was set to make his North American live debut, has already pulled him from the lineup. For his part, he says all he wants is "peace, solitude, and to fill my music with passion and peace on my channel."

The question hanging in the air is perhaps older than music itself: can art be separated from the artist, mysticism from its shadow? Tabakis seems to suggest that truth (like the notes on his fretless guitar) lives in the in-between spaces, where sin and grace dance together in uncertainty.
A statement that blends millennia-old orthodoxy with an almost gnostic vision of freedom.

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