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.
A pilgrimage in music through the physical and spiritual places where we go to connect — from the rivers and rooftops of New Orleans to the Rocky Mountains, the Slovenian hills, the redwood groves of Muir Woods, and the "Gaia Place" for each of us.
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.
Timed to World Environment Day, host Laura Dedelow announces Kate Daisy Grant and Nick Pynn as the inaugural recipients of the Earth Eclectic Music Award — then surrounds their work with an hour of tree songs, two pre-release tracks from their forthcoming album Songs from the Grove, and closes with an unexpected emotional gift in honor of the award-winners' ailing rescue dog Lemon.
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.
Dedicated to our inaugural Earth Eclectic Music Award. This episode features great nominations that were released prior to the 2024-2026 parameters. We think they deserve Honorable Mention!
Laura Dedelow celebrates the Eastern Screech Owl and our ancient human bond with owls of all sorts through an hour of music ranging from swing jazz and indie rock to field recordings and experimental sound, inspired by the very owl living in her own backyard Magnolia tree.
"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.
Makes the case for instrumental music as ecospiritual expression through an hour of wordless celebrations of Earth — from Goa trance and New Orleans electronics to guitar on a sacred Japanese mountain, a sixteen-second Louisiana ambient flash, and a 1972 jazz reading of Marvin Gaye's ecological elegy. It all stems from an observation two centuries ago that music clothes thought with power language cannot impart.
Laura writes, "In the Northern Hemisphere it is time to celebrate the Spring Cross between the Vernal Equinox and Summer Solstice. In other words we honor Beltane, May Day, the May Queen and the Green Man. Winter has pretty much passed where I live in the Northern Hemisphere and we are experiencing the Greening Time. The fires that burned in the hearths all winter have been extinguished and we light new ones with the embers of Beltane bonfires."