There's no place like Earth, and we've got the music to prove it. Ten songs (and one field recording) that celebrate the uniqueness of Planet Earth.
Dedicated to the memory of singer-songwriter Russ Arlotta, Episode 0125 — "Our Planetary Home" — follows the word, the concept, and the longing on a winding path from the rocky tip of Cornwall to the coast of Senegal, from the plains of Venezuela to the vast skies of Hawaii.
From the machine-haunted fields of County Cork to the drought-stricken soil of Buenos Aires, "Our Hunger for Land" assembles thirteen artists in a global meditation on humanity's relationship to the earth we plant, plunder, mourn, and revere.
Host Bart Everson presents "Cicada Buzz" — an episode years in the making, sparked by a tip from a loyal listener and opening with a miraculous gift: the brand-new single from Dead Can Dance, whose mythology of the cicada leads straight back to the Muses themselves.
Host Bart Everson frames an hour of healing music, spoken word, and field recordings from Belgium, England, Argentina, Indiana, Seattle, Chile, and Slovakia as a prayer to the living planet — opening and closing with two different songs called "Gaia," and threading his own dawn recordings through the hour. Perhaps the first act of ecological reverence is simply to listen.
From Billie Eilish's oblique pop provocation and a Sámi yoik without words, through hip-hop, vaporwave, a rewritten patriotic hymn, a demo for a song cycle about a tree, and a master's thesis processed through grief, to Radiohead closing the set at their Oxford home — Earth Eclectic assembles an urgent, genre-spanning chorus of artists confronting the climate crisis, while the sound of a melting Swiss glacier runs beneath it all.
From a Colorado poet's daily practice and a Brecht lyric written under fascism, through Barcelona harbor, Caracas, Indigenous Colombia, a Paiwan-language firefly song from Taiwan, and a 2002 German demo about fairies in the forest fog, this episode maps the reciprocal relationship of light and darkness as seen from an Earth-based perspective — and finds, in their interplay, something very close to a theology.
From a sardonic Chicago pianist cataloguing microplastics and clathrate guns, through an Irish elegy for a stream of the dead and a geologist-poet's Permian nightmare, to an unreleased song from Sweden about leaving a toxic Earth, we map the full emotional response to prospects of collapse, climate change, cataclysm, extinction, and ecological catastrophe.
Host Bart Everson presents an hour of nominated music for the inaugural Earth Eclectic Music Award, featuring folk, ambient, and world artists from the USA, Austria, Ireland, Argentina, Turkey, and beyond, all united by a reverence for the living Earth.
"Songs of the Great Mother" offers an hour of devotional music honoring the Living Earth as divine feminine — spanning Bulgarian wordless vocal, Swedish folk-rock, Norwegian pop, Lithuanian experimental jazz, Japanese ambient, and American choral music, anchored by a personal message from Swedish singer-songwriter Annika Fehling about the island walk that summoned her song into being.