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This week on Earth Eclectic Radio Hour, host Bart Everson presents “Where Words Leave Off,” a devoted exploration of instrumental music as a vehicle for ecological consciousness. The hour opens with “Animal Helpers” by Sirius — Goa trance from Thessaloniki, Greece, freshly reissued by Poland’s DAT Universe — before New Orleans’ own Quintron delivers the crackling electronic sprawl of “Thunder Circles,” drawn from his celebrated Ephemeral Ponds album of wildlife-embedded soundscapes. Brazil’s Afterdeath Television offers the lush ambient “Narcissus,” followed by Colombian-Hawaiian artist Ernesto Escaf’s “Iao” — the Hawaiian word for yes — and Biostatic’s shimmering “霎,” a Chinese character suggesting light rain, built from nature recordings gathered around a studio in Marshall, North Carolina. (Check out the video.) The set closes with the elusive Anqaa’s “Spirit Savane TD,” a meditation on the open savanna.

After establishing the theme, drawing on Henry Russell Cleveland’s 1835 observation that music “expresses thoughts and emotions to which speech can give no utterance,” the second set opens with French artist Thomassaint Michel’s “Lumières sur la mer,” a jazz evocation of oceanic light and undulation. A sequence of brief, jewel-like pieces follows: Kokichi Yanagisawa’s “no title 6,” recorded on the sacred Shugendo mountain of Iizuna in Japan with the ambient sounds of fellow pilgrims on the path; Steph Richards’ one-minute jazz eruption “Sacred Sea: Amphitrite”; Junkyard Shaman’s “Summer Memories,” from a Finnish transplant now living in Osaka; Nyoka Shoje’s “Coniferous” — a mere sixteen seconds of Louisiana ambient that somehow says what it needs to say; Rachel Curtin’s tender piano piece “Kindness”; and Bernard Fort’s extraordinary “Conversations grivoises,” in which Michel Mandel’s clarinet enters into genuine dialogue with the songs of a Mistle Thrush and a Black Woodpecker. Pacific Walker’s “Mycelium Ab Astris Ad Astra III,” a fungal cosmic meditation from Bloomington, Indiana, carries the program toward its magnificent conclusion: Richard Evans’ 1972 Atlantic recording of “Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology),” Marvin Gaye’s ecological elegy rendered without a single word.

Quotation: “Music begins where language ends; it expresses thoughts and emotions, to which speech can give no utterance; it clothes words with a power which language cannot impart.” — Henry Russell Cleveland (1835) via Quote Investigator

Photo: “Words Cannot Express” by Bart Everson (Rip Van Winkle Gardens, Iberia Parish, Louisiana)