This recording presents the material captured by German documentary filmmaker Philip Gröning for his acclaimed 2002 film Into Great Silence. Gröning was the first outsider granted admittance to the Grande Chartreuse monastery of the Carthusian order, in the mountains outside Grenoble, France, and it took him 16 years to get permission to come in. He lived with the monks for six months, and in June 2002 he recorded Matins and Lauds services (which he, apparently following the monks themselves, calls the Office of the Night). The services were recorded separately only because battery life at that time was limited to three hours. What is offered here is thus something of a "soundtrack" to Gröning's documentary, and it's very much a live recording as monks shift, proceed, and cough. From the point of view of the listener interested in recordings of chant, it's also something very rare -- a recording of chant pretty much as it was used by the people who first created it. As Gröning puts it (the booklet for this Jade label release is in English only, with chants translated from Latin into English), "During those long hours, sometimes difficult and very often cold, I suddenly became aware that the psalms, lessons, chants, prayers, and thoughts had been sung here, in this same location, for almost 1,000 years." What you hear are scripture readings, responsorial chants, psalms and hymns, and a short homily in French (this too is translated). The disc should be heard by any listener who has used chant in a way that divorces it from its original context, anyone who is curious about the medieval church, and by students at all levels, for serious medievalists it may well be a fascinating piece of living tradition and something of a puzzle, for the origins of the specific chants used are not specified anywhere. A fascinating if offbeat item.