"TIBETAN CHANTS FOR WORLD PEACE," The Gyuto Monks Tantric Choir (White Swan)

No matter what preconceptions you might bring to the experience when you put on "Tibetan Chants for World Peace" by the Gyuto Monks Tantric Choir, the release isn't likely to leave you the same way it found you.

Recorded by Grateful Dead drummer Mickey Hart, "Tibetan Chants" doesn't put up any language barriers or address politics, and despite the spiritual methodology behind the music, listeners need not be Buddhists to be affected.

The "songs" are four tracks, opening with "Mandala Offering," an a cappella invocation that introduces the multi phonic vocal delivery of the monks. The overtone singing, also known as "throat singing" because it involves manipulation of sound in the throat, has been practiced by Tibetan monks for centuries. Not only do they not sound human, the otherworldly voices seem more like grainy electronic noise than any sound an animal would make. And the monks' extension of notes into a swarm of reverberations creates an inescapably hypnotic atmosphere.

Once the enlightened beings are invoked by the first track, the monks shift to "Praising Chakrasamvara" in honor of the deity of meditation, and here is where instrumentation is introduced -- a pellet drum (damaru) and small bell (drilbu) used as marking points for lines of verse.

"Tibetan Chants" then moves into "Blessing the Offerings," a 24-minute opus featuring those industrial-strength voices plus cymbals and drums and subtle horns winding through repetitious currents in an insistent drive to force a meditative state on its audience. The release closes with the 14-minute "Great Sacred Music" featuring music that escalates in intensity and is performed just once a year at the Gyuto monastery.

World peace is a tall order for "Tibetan Chants," but it wouldn't be unrealistic for listeners to use this extraordinary music to pull focus and think out solutions for more modest problems.