‘The guitar was made by God,” says Father Dionysios Tabakis, sitting in the living room of his flat in Nafplio, a city on Greece’s Peloponnesian coast, surrounded by a huge assortment of musical instruments and religious icons. Dressed in long black robes and sporting a fine grey wispy beard, Tabakis sounds as if he could be speaking from the pulpit when he adds: “The devil cannot create something. God has created all.”His favourite is an adapted Harley Benton R-457. Bought for only €135, it’s a striking electric guitar, yielding chords that are more wobbly and atonal than those of an ordinary guitar, but also warmer. Tabakis likens the sound to the “waves” of the human voice.The R-457’s characteristic ripples of distortions swirl all over Paradise Metal, a home-recorded album of doom metal, Christmas carols and religious dubstep that catapulted Father Tabakis from utter obscurity to cult status earlier this year, after experimental music bible Pitchfork conferred it a critics’ score of 7.6 – higher than Aphex Twin’s Drukqs or Daft Punk’s Discovery.What complicates Father Tabakis’s guitar passion is that the 53-year-old is an ordained priest in the Greek Orthodox church, a branch of Christianity that has traditionally deemed all instruments and secular tunes satanic and a threat to the modesty of family life. “The electric guitar is a bit misunderstood in the church,” he says. “It’s thought to be ‘of the devil’.”Father Tabakis is on a one-man mission to change this. That we are meeting face to face feels like a small miracle, given his reclusive nature. When I contacted the people at his record companies a month ago, they conceded that they had neither met him in person nor talked to him on the phone. He has a YouTube channel but no further online presence of note. After the release of his album in April, he got a raft of media invitations but turned down most, worried he’d be made to look silly on TV.One of 8,000 presbyters registered in the centuries-old Greek church, Tabakis is committed to his priesthood, which he refers to in the collective “we”. Although not celibate – he has been married to Foteini for 32 years and they have three children – the ideal of hermitage is one he aspires to. He makes annual pilgrimages to Mount Athos, the monastic, autonomous holy site, and admires ascetics and self-sacrificial priests, such as his grandfather-in-law, who lived among bears and wolves on the border with Albania. “Those are the real priests,” he says. His own talents, he says bashfully, are “showier”. ‘God is tasteful. He likes nice things. He’s not gauche’… Tabakis in the Church of the Nativity of the Theotokos, where he serves. Photograph: Panagiotis Moschandreou/The GuardianBorn in 1972, Tabakis grew up in the port of Piraeus, in a household so poor that his parents had tried to have him aborted. “Twice!” he says. “Both times, the doctor was out.” Piraeus was teeming with Greeks who had fled from Smyrna when the city was set ablaze by Turkish armed forces in 1922. His grandfather was among them. All that Byzantine culture continues to flow through Tabakis. “That’s where I’m from,” he says. “It’s in my DNA.”Music became a way to express his cultural heritage. In middle school, priests in his parish introduced him to Byzantine music, and he has since taught himself an array of obscure Byzantine instruments: the banjo-shaped cümbüş, the kabak kemane knee fiddle, the long-necked yayli tanbur lute, the zurna pipe, the ney flute, and various types of lyre. He leaps at the opportunity to demonstrate the difference between two of the 15 types of ney he has laid out underneath an enormous portrait of the Virgin Mary (one is “toothier”, apparently). Tabakis credits the mother of Jesus not only for his own non-abortion but his recent musical success.About four years ago, he started to record his own songs in the most DIY fashion. His son showed him how to use production software and his upstairs neighbour taught him the guitar. Evgenia Simela Armeni, a 23-year old he met at church, provided him with vocals, recording herself with her phone inside her university flat.‘An absolute playground’ … the cover of Tabakis’s cult album Paradise Metal. Photograph: ElhellellHe started posting his songs on YouTube around the same time, though he says: “I never had any ambitions to become famous.” His channel amassed a modest 4,000 followers, but one of them was Nikolas Rafael, founder of Thessaloniki’s uber-hip music label Elhellell, who was instantly mesmerised. “Musicians belong to very specific archetypes nowadays,” he says. “Everyone is a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy.” Tabakis defies all that. “He’s a nice change from the typical artist.” He tracked down Tabakis’s email on a Christian forum and proposed they make a record.Paradise Metal is a wild ride, marrying Byzantine music, Christian orthodoxy, heavy metal, rap and techno. Resonant incantations feature on most of the songs, but there are unexpected twists at every turn. A track entitled Techno in a Monastery opens with a rallying call – “Are you ready?” – before launching into rhythmic chanting superimposed over an ominous, synthy beat. “An absolute playground,” is how Pitchfork described the track which manages to be both ambitious and expecting little of itself.“I try to experiment and explore,” says Tabakis, who quotes a line by the Greek poet Yiannis Ritsos: “I was never jealous of big houses, but of big windows,” adding, “and every musical instrument is a window, through which you can see a part of the universe, a part of the sky.” Metal, says the etymologically curious priest, “comes from metalláō, which means to mine, to explore”.The title of one song – Flexareis Karga, Ekklisiastiki Rap – roughly translates as: “You’re Flexing Big Time (Church Rap).” Father Tabakis explains: “‘Flexing’ means to occupy yourself with something, and ‘big time’ means a lot.” He says he is not a political artist, because he’s not sure how much of what we see is real. Still, Dubai Paei (meaning “Bye, Dubai”) was inspired by the current conflict in the Middle East, and the mass exodus of people when bombs dropped on the luxury-lifestyle UAE city. “It reminded me of Babylon in the Book of Revelation, which emptied out, so to speak. It’s a satire about the vanity of wealth.”Most surprising, perhaps, is how non-preachy the priest-turned-musician’s album is. His motivation for venturing into rap, he says, was to try to breach the chasm between older generations, who he thinks can be intransigent, and younger ones, who speak a different language. “I had to find some rhymes,” he says, “which was hard. I went online to find some slang, and did what I could.”‘They say a priest is better than a king’ … Father Tabakis in Nafplio. Photograph: Panagiotis Moschandreou/The GuardianNone of his kids are very religious: Tabakis’ daughter is a 25-year-old tattooed photographer who lives in Athens. He deliberately did not force his passions on to them. What do the other priests make of his success? “They haven’t told us, which is a good thing,” Tabakis says. “We’re not from here so we don’t know them that well,” he says, even though they’ve been here 27 years. He implies there’s some competition within the church as a whole – that some people aren’t in it for the right reasons, or are perhaps more concerned with power.The Orthodox church’s old equation of secular music with the devil certainly doesn’t trouble him. God “is tasteful”, he insists. “He likes nice things. He’s not gauche.” By creating something beautiful, even with instruments, Tabakis honours his faith. And he’s non-committal about his future as an artist. As successful as his musical career might be, he’d never abandon the church to pursue it full-time. “They say a priest is better than a king, because he can turn bread into the body of Christ. Not even an angel can do that.” When he goes out on a walk with his wife, he somehow always ends up at his church.When I ask about forthcoming live performances, he answers with his own brand of poetry, half high-minded mysticism, half absurdist joke: “It feels like they’ve removed a fish from its waters to take it on a walk so it can get some air.” He pauses then adds: “I feel very awkward. But if it brings people joy, then I’m for it.”