This time last year Brian McIvor, owner of SDG Records, received an excited phone call. "You know that CD you did with the monks of Glenstal Abbey?" the voice at the other end of the line inquired. "Well, it's in the charts, and it's higher than the Evita soundtrack, and here's a headline for you: Monks outsell Madonna."
The Irish record-buying public's first exposure to music from Glenstal was through a series of recordings by Micheal O'Suilleabhain and Noirin Ni Riain featuring an eclectic mix of music, some Eastern, some Irish traditional, for which the monks supplied choral accompaniment. But it was the 1997 RTE/Ainm Records disc, The Monks Of Glenstal Abbey, which tapped into the burgeoning interest in Gregorian chant and took off into the big-time.
Brian McIvor, who did the sound recording on that CD, had already produced a number of discs on his own SDG label - Bach fans will spot the allusion, Sole Dei Gloria ("For The Glory Of God Alone") being the letters with which the composer used to sign his works - including Organ Music From Glenstal Abbey, a collection of pieces performed by Glenstal's top-notch organist Andrew Cyprian Love.
Love's latest disc, Dancing Before The Ark, has just been released. It is unusual in that all but four tracks are improvisations in various styles which don't exist anywhere in written form; a far cry from the rules and regulations of plainsong, you might think, but as Love argues in his sleeve notes, establishing a creative relationship between the charismatic individualism of the early Christian leaders and the external order required by corporate worship was "one of the earliest and fundamental issues in the early Christian liturgical experience".