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There’s no place like Earth, and we’ve got the music to prove it.

We start the show with Yolanda Wisher & The Afroeaters, a jazzy spoken-word piece, “Without a Name,” about an encounter with an animal that resists being identified. “Mon Amour Sauvage” by Dead Can Dance is “a song devoted to Mother Nature. A pagan love song to celebrate her works…” Keep ‘em coming, Brendan, please. We hear a tribute to plant life by the fabulous Kate Sutherland, then an instrumental, “Back to Nature,” by Mortaz of Iran. Host Bart Everson confesses Iran’s been on his mind especially for the last six and half months.

We’re especially keen to play new releases, and it doesn’t get much fresher than the new album from Spell Songs; it’s called In Thin Air, out on Hudson Records as of September 4th, an album released in conjunction with The Book of Birds by Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris. We feature the track “Ride the World’s Winds,” which segues dramatically into “Surrounded by Foam.” This exquisite number by Roxane Métayer and Katya Shirshkova was literally composed in direct collaboration with the marsh and waterways of the Doode Bemde nature reserve in Belgium. Roxane went there every month for a year to make this album, just came out in June, titled Périodique des Chemins Boueux / Herbes Étincelles, which could be translated as Chronicle of the Muddy Paths and Sparkling Grasses. Amazing work.

Under Bart’s narration is a field recording by Felice Sciorilli, “the sound produced by the sea waves crashing on the natural sandstone cliffs of the Etruscan Coast in Tuscany… a sort of breath, a breathing that changes, that evolves timbre and dynamics over time until it calms down and finds rest.” This is an excerpt from a longer piece, “Breaths,” from the fantastic album 14 Soundscapes on Biodiversità Records. Highly recommended.

And isn’t it weird? It’s delightfully strange: these sounds, this music, life on this planet, it all seems so surprising, so unlikely. And that’s the inspiration for this episode: Bart happened upon an article in Scientific American by Phil Plait. Space telescopes are so powerful now that we routinely detect planets going around other stars, known as exoplanets. We’ve found over six thousand so far. Yet none of them are like Earth — not really, not in terms of being able to sustain life as we know it. That could all change tomorrow, but for now, as far as we know, there’s no place like Earth.

In the second half of the program, for something completely different we head to the desert with Juhi Bansal‘s composition, “Land of Waking Dreams,” as rendered by Ann DuHamel from the New Focus release, Prayers for a Feverish Planet: New Music about Climate Change, Vol. 1. A chain placed on the piano strings creates a “shimmering timbre” meant to portray the desert at night, the “whistling wind across open plateaus.” See if you can hear it. Makoto Rikitake brings us “Unseen Choir of the Mountain.” The lyrics are in Japanese, celebrating the “countless mysterious beings [that] dwell within the mountains, each emitting their own unique sound.” And that brings us to “Earth Song: Tribute to Gibson Gonnie” by Gada गदा, actually written by the man himself, the late Gibson Gonnie, a Navajo elder, and sung by Quinton Gonnie.

The music featured in this episode is all new, all released (or re-released) this year, plus two tracks from last year. Bart likes to close out the show with a golden oldie, however. He found “No Place Like Earth” on the soundtrack from the kids’ television series Big Blue Marble. Released on vinyl in 1974 by A&M Records, written by Peter Chandler Travis, and performed by The Trend Setters, maybe this will bring back memories for some of our older listeners.

Photo: NASA’s Mercury-bound Messenger spacecraft captured several stunning images of Earth during a gravity-assisted swingby of our home planet on August 2nd, 2005.