SHERRY FINZER, Dreamweaver - Music for Deep Dreaming

As one of new age music’s most important and impactful artist over the past two decades, composer and multi-flutist Sherry Finzer, over the course of dozens of solo and collaborative recordings, has enjoyed countless major awards from key genre tastemakers, internet and radio outlets and music organizations, including Zone Music Reporter, Roundglass Music Awards, One World Music Radio and Majestica.

Throughout her prolific career, she has discovered something essential about the way her music touched people’s lives that transcends all those accolades. Listeners were using her beautiful, imaginative and easy flowing flute pieces to help them with their overall well-being and specifically anxiety, stress, pain, tinnitus and insomnia. Still engaged in classical music when she began releasing music in 2009, she didn’t realize its value as a tool to help people sleep – until one fan told her that her 2011 EP Sanctuary: Earth had been particularly effective for this purpose.

Nearly 15 years after releasing that project, Sherry created her latest hypnotic, exquisitely rendered and sonically immersive multi-faceted album Dreamweaver: Music for Deep Dreaming for the specific purpose of helping people combating insomnia. From the mesmerizing, deeply meditative opening track “Somnolence” (where a single resonating crystal bowl opens to a dreamscape of rich, resonant Native American-style flute expressions and weavings) through the gently graceful, soul-transformative (and literally wind-enhanced!) “Enlightenment” (a showcase for the artist’s soaring concert C flute artistry), Sherry creates not only a purposeful musical program enduring relaxation but a surreal experience she likens to a portal opening to a realm of “quiet magic of sound turned to dream.”

While the goal is getting the listener to shut out the world, calm their body and brainwaves and enter a deep dream state, the result is something more transcendent and enduring – a therapeutic experience that sets new standards for this type of recording in the new age realm.  

Dreamweaver – Music for Deep Dreaming is billed as a solo album, yet Sherry has an important non-human collaborator with her every step of the way – the historic, one-of-a-kind recording environment called The Tank (more formally, The TANK Center for the Sonic Arts). In a nutshell, the seven story Corten steel water tank, originally constructed around 1940 as railroad water treatment facility, was moved to Rangely, CO in the mid-60’s for use as part of a fire suppression system for the local utility company. Environmental conditions prevented the realization of this plan, but the bed of gravel upon which the tank was placed bowed its floor into a gentle parabola, giving it an extraordinary internal acoustical resonance that artists have used as a special performance and recording space. There’s an extensive, well worth reading story online about how donations and massive artist support helped preserve The Tank after its owner threatened to sell it. One article calls it a “sonic wonder of the world, with a shifting, swirling reverberation longer and richer than the Taj Mahal or the Great Pyramid.”

The Tank has been part of Sherry’s personal and recording life for the past six years, as she’s made the trek from her home in Phoenix to Rangely to record there. Dreamweaver is her 11th “collab” with The Tank. “For me, the experience is magical and otherworldly,” she says. “The reverb can last up to 45 seconds and the notes from my flute seem to ascend to the heavens. When I am in The Tank and the door shuts, I feel that it is a portal to the universe, and I enter a flow state. 95% of the songs I have recorded there were purely channeled and improvised in one take. I usually bring the majority of my flute collection with me and record with many of them. I chose this particular collection of recordings because I felt that together, with their slower tempos, that they became a soundtrack for a peaceful night of sleep and dreaming.”

Within that sacred space, Sherry weaves a majestic mosaic of soothing, largely improvised sounds that often feel like channeling from a higher dimension. Like like most solo new age collections, Dreamweaver is best appreciated as a straight through listen of all 38 minutes. By design, you may be asleep by then, but if you’re not, you’ll definitely feel chilled out, the weight of the world lifted from your body and soul. Yet for the playlist minded listener, there are some incredible entry points into the experience that make for splendid aural atmosphere as well.

One of my personal favorites is “Fascination,” another piece that begins with and includes chiming crystal bowls throughout its lush invitation (rendered on Sherry’s concert C flute) to a state of curiosity and wonder as the listener/insomnia sufferer cycles through various sleep states and brainwave patterns. From my humble perspective, some of Sherry’s grandest, most spirit caressing gestures are the two gems she performs on her bass flute, the dark and haunting seduction “Mystical” and “Enchantment,” which lives up to its name via hypnosis-inducing, echoing melodic notes, moody musings and a sense of murky mystery and wonder.

Beyond these personal preferences, Sherry uses each piece and its selected lead flute voice to convey individual meanings within the whole – i.e. recording “Retrospection” on the higher toned alto flute as a reflection of gratitude before drifting off to sleep and “Otherworldly” on the deep toned contrabass flute (two octaves lower than the concert C!) to help the listener slow his/her breathing and head off to an immersive land of deeper slumber.  

Although Sherry put together these pieces as a collection to help with insomnia, she feels the music of Dreamweaver, like many of her other works, is also suitable for meditation and yoga. “When I record inside of The Tank, I visualize the music spiraling up and out through the top of the structure and the music being sent out to the world for those who need it to receive it,” she says.

"What I love most is being able to channel these ideas and songs in this special space, and my intentions are always to bring more peace and healing to the world through my music. It is an honor to hear from so many listeners regarding how my music has helped them to get through dark times, or listening to my music instead of being sedated during a medical procedure. I have one fan who suffers from tinnitus that runs my music through a masking program in his hearing aids 24/7.”