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This week on the Earth Eclectic Radio Hour, host Bart Everson presents “Songs of the Great Mother,” a devotional hour drawing from across the globe and across the decades to honor the Living Earth in her most ancient aspect. The program opens with “Earth Mother” by Fáerhin of Bulgaria — a piece of wordless ambient vocal music in which the voice itself becomes elemental — before the Annika Fehling Trio arrives with “Mother Earth Song,” a folk-inflected declaration of grief and love for a neglected planet. As a special gift to listeners, Swedish singer-songwriter Annika Fehling speaks directly from her home on the magical Baltic island of Gotland, sharing the origin story of the song: a solitary walk in deep woodland quiet, where the presence of Earth became almost audible, and the song arrived whole upon her return.

Ananda Gaia of Durango, Colorado follows with their seven-minute “Earth Mother” from Sacred Elementals, before Norway’s The Last Hurrah!! offer a pop-bright “Mother Nature” from their Rune Grammofon EP. Lithuania’s Port Mone contribute the wordless, meditative “Mother” from their 2025 album Whisper — an attempt, they say, to show that nature and culture together constitute “that one great world.” An excerpt from Ashera’s “Mother…” closes the first half, with Bart pausing to note that while the ancient Semitic goddess Asherah was worshipped across Syria and Palestine as the consort of Yahweh, the artist (spelling his name without the final H) is a Sydney-based post-minimal ambient composer — a quiet act of reclamation across three millennia.

The program’s second half opens with Manchester’s Nicholas Peters and his “Mother Earth” — a meditative electro-acoustic journey built from birdsong and stream recordings gathered by the River Bollin, and the resonance of an antique Manipuri singing bowl — before reaching back to 1983 for Fumio Miyashita’s sweeping fifteen-minute “大地 Mother Earth,” a landmark of Japanese ambient music originally circulated only on cassette and CD-R, now reissued by Personal Affair. Miyashita, Bart reminds us, was in the original 1969 Tokyo cast of Hair — a detail that places this music in unexpected historical company. Seattle’s Gaia Consort offer the nocturnal “Secret Womb of Night” before Bart closes the hour with a 1990 recording by Gaia’s Voice, the San Francisco Bay Area pagan choir whose “One with Our Mother” carries the warmth of decades of festival devotion in its ninety seconds. Bart also shares news of the inaugural Earth Eclectic Music Award, with nearly forty nominated releases under consideration — the recipient to be announced on World Environment Day, the fifth of June.

Artwork: “Earth Mother” by Persephone Everpax (age five).