About This Project
The Third Planet -Melt In Time
The Third Planet – Melt in Time (2002)
PLAYLIST:
01 – Zardasht (Dami-Nazar)
02 Nuelly (Dami-Kouider)
03 Biroher’o Abosan (Dami-Das)
04 El-Ghira (Dami-Kouider)
05 Paradis (Dami-Nazar)
06 Aziz Jan (Dami-Nazar)
07 Baba Gurgur (Dami-Nazar)
08 Lya Eddala (Dami-Kouider_Nazar)
09 Lorke (Dami-Nazar)
19 Kader (popular)
11 Bolo Shanti Bolo (Dami-Das)
12 Laow (Dami-Nazar)
13 Heavy Prayer (Dami-Das)
14 Bandalo (Dami)
15 Bolo Shanti Bolo – Club rmx – (Dami-Das)
16 Lorke – Club rmx – (Dami-Nazar)
17 Leleo – Club rmx – (Dami-Nazar)
18 Crazy Tabla (Dami-Das)
19 Not This Stuff (Dami)
20 Paradis – Club rmx – (Dami-Nazar)
21 The Rhythm Session (Dami-Das)
INSTRUMENTS AND MUSICIANS
SAAZ AND VOICE (Nazar – Kurdistan – Iraq) : this is an Oriental lute with strings producing a very open and distinctive sound. Some keys are at the interval of a fourth of tone according to the tradition of a large region that includes the Middle East and part of the Mediterranean. The tunes that Nazar sings and plays are very ancient but sound extremely lively even to our modern ears.
KEYBOARDS (Maurizio Dami – Firenze – Italy): they represent the “primordial soup”, the sound of “reality as it is”, unaffected by history and culture. They provide the “glue” and create the environment where tunes can swim like fish in the water.
KEYBOARDS and VOCAL (Smail Kouider Aissa, Algeria) : They represent the dialogue amongst different Mediterranean cultures and the gateway to the Arab world. Smail comes from Algerian Rai.
TABLAS ( Arup Kanti Das, Rashmi v. Bhatt, India): the most typical and universally famous Indian percussions need no further presentation. Due to their precise tuning they are not only rhythmic but also harmonic instruments.
DAF, DARBOUKA, Jembè (Paolo Casu – Italia) : The rhythmic colours of Africa and the Middle East.
November 2002
The Third Planet of the solar system is the Earth. Starting from the name we chose for our band, we perceive music as a way to communicate with different cultures to favour a better and deeper understanding of human nature.
No rigid division line has ever been drawn to separate the music regions of the world.
India, the Middle East and Europe, despite their considerably different music traditions, do share the same roots: this is something that clearly emerges whenever we listen to very ancient melodies that sound stunningly mode.
The Third Planet isn’t just a music experience but also one with individuals coming from different cultures and working together to reach an objective.
As Smail, our Algerian singer, put it, our cultures are different, but the work is one. Work is indeed the truely noble activity through which the universal nature of man can be revealed. And there’s a form of work that has preserved its dignity along the centuries and is becoming extremely relevant again: the craft workshop.
The Third Planet is a craft workshop,like those of the Florentine Renaissance where artists from all over the world converge to develop projects together, feeding into them the wealth of their original cultures.Now that ethnic rivalries – never subdued but simply stifled by ideologies and dictatorships – are dramatically breaking up again, the Third Planet is there to proove that the dialogue among different cultures is not only possible but indeed indispensable in artistic work. as well as in everyday life. From time immemorial this dialogue has favoured innovative creation; and offered traditions the fresh sap for their renovation and development.
At the beginning of our collaboration , we would define ourselves as a “multi-ethnic group”; later on, due to the growing trend of associating “ethnic” to such terms as “war”, “minority” and finally the awful “cleansing” , we preferred to call ourselves a “multicultural band”, though we are not totally happy with this definition either. As a matter of fact, in our workshop, we do not simply put together pieces of different cultures but we have the ambition of contributing to the birth of a new kind of culture, originating from the free and easy use of art forms and art styles, unbiased and unclassified but appreciated for their crucial contribution to the creative process.
“Style” is probably the only aspect of cultures we are interested in and consider worth preserving. Life-style, in the first place, that is work-, art-, music-, food-, language- , writing- and , why not, fashion-style too.
The rest of what we call culture is of little interest to us as it appears to be nothing but an endless variation over the same theme, exploited by the powerful to divide people and make them fight against one another .
We believe that cultural differences must be respected and valorised, not merely accepted.
There’s no respect in mere acceptance: ” Yes, I accept you because you’re different from me and there’s nothing I can do about it, I live next to you but I don’t care about you etc. ” Respect is something different:” Yes, I respect your culture and that’s precisely why I feel entitled to criticize it and discuss those aspects I do not agree with. I pick some elements from your culture to enrich mine and offer some of mine to you as a gift.”
Nothing new can be born out of acceptance that indeed risks to generate new conflicts. Respect is our hope for a better world.
Like in scientific labs, where researchers of different origins, ethnic groups and cultures peacefully work together, in our workshop we try out new languages of music, by making different styles interact. In doing so,day after day, our ” cultural differences” become less and less relevant while our individual styles as artists emerge and unfold providing us with a great and really multi-cultural wealth to share.
The world must not be perceived as made up of watertight compartments.
Peoples of the world have been influencing each otherr from time immemorial and their traditions reflect such influences. Today there’s a lot of concern about the diffusion of anglo-saxon music and the risk of cultural standardization it brings about, as a sort of side-effect of globalization. This is a rather arrogant view. The alledged supremacy of the Western culture (if it ever exists) won’t be eternal, as nothing eternal has ever appeared in this world. If Western music is at present affecting Eastern music, we’ll eventually get a feed-back from it and that will in turn affect our music.. This is simply part of the process of evolution.
That’s why we dislike the term “contamination” and would rather think of music as a “development process”. and of ourselves as world musicians that draw on their different traditions to develop a new and modern form of art.