The Third Planet - Zardasht

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.