From the peat bogs of Australia to the bayous of Louisiana and the fog-haunted folklore of the Old World, Episode 0122 — “Will o’ the Wetlands” — wades deep into the music, mystery, and teeming life of the world’s most liminal landscapes.
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 Laura Dedelow, still slightly damp from a real Indiana deluge, celebrates summer precipitation in all its forms — rain, heat lightning, hail, and even virga — threading a field recording by Bart Everson through an hour that moves from London indie-pop through Kentucky country and deep into the gospel and R&B soul of New Orleans.
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 Jimetta Rose’s gospel choir invocation of the Los Angeles sun to Lilli Lewis’s firefly closing the New Orleans evening, host Laura Dedelow gathers thirteen artists from three continents to celebrate summer in all its aspects: the light, the storms, the flowers, the fledglings, and the brief, luminous dark.
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.
Host Laura Dedelow dedicates an hour to the music of national parks and public lands, in the days surrounding the 250th anniversary of the American Declaration of Independence.
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.
