Dean Evenson ranks among new age music’s most enduring and productive voices, having taken up the flute to craft dozens of ambient and therapeutic recordings that stretch from the late 1970s into subsequent decades. His signature layering of field recordings with gentle instrumental textures essentially established the stylistic template for the genre during the 1980s. Together with his wife, Dudley Evenson, he launched the Soundings of the Planet label to issue both their joint projects and his solo work, issuing landmark titles such as 1993’s Forest Rain and 1999’s Healing Waters and continuing through 2022’s Earth Within.
During the 1960s he worked as a studio engineer at Regent Sound; afterward he and Dudley turned to videography, crisscrossing the United States with early portable equipment to document “the awakening consciousness as it was manifesting in people’s lives” and gathering hours of footage that captured the natural world in motion. The couple later settled in Tucson, Arizona, where they built a substantial enterprise around Soundings of the Planet. Their stated intention was to help listeners “experience the healing energies of music and natural sounds and get in touch with a more peaceful place inside themselves.” The label proved highly effective at producing and circulating recordings that fulfilled this aim, and Evenson took on production duties for many of its artists.
Beginning in 1979 he released his own albums that merged environmental sounds with his softly flowing flute lines and a range of acoustic and electronic instruments. All appeared on Soundings of the Planet, sometimes as duet projects with Dudley Evenson, Scott Huckabay, Walter Makichen, or other kindred musicians. The steady stream of focused work yielded dozens of albums, typically arriving at a rate of roughly one per year and occasionally more after 1986. Among the notable entries are 1989’s Ocean Dreams, 1999’s Healing Waters, 2005’s Eagle River, and 2013’s Dream Space. Evenson maintained the same pace into the 2020s, teaming with Huckabay, Doug Tessler, and Phil Heaven for 2020’s Healing Resonance, continuing his long-running partnership with Dudley Evenson on 2021’s Monet’s Garden, and contemplating nature and temporality across 2022’s Earth Within.
