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Andy Kershaw returns to the airwaves in the new year to present ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Radio 3's most significant and ambitious world music project ever.

Music Planet takes Radio 3 listeners on a journey around the world and sees Andy and fellow presenter Lucy Duran travel to remote destinations around the world to record the music there.

The series accompanies and visits the same destinations as ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ One's Human Planet, a new landmark anthropological series celebrating man's remarkable ingenuity and success as a species.

Music Planet will offer the chance to gain a deeper understanding of the cultures they witness on ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ One's Human Planet by experiencing their music, sounds and songs.

From Switzerland, Peru, Madagascar, Kenya, Greenland and Mali, through to the Solomon Islands and Papa New Guinea, from the frozen communities of the arctic winter to the Amazonian villagers who have never met Europeans, Music Planet gives listeners unique access to sounds from around the world.

Key moments for the series include the sounds of the Bat People of Papa New Guinea, the mystical voices of the shamans of Mongolia and Greenland's "katajjaq", a vocal contest between two women with songs that involve throat singing and imitating animal cries.

Andy Kershaw says: "I am thrilled to be back on Radio 3 working again with a team of bright, imaginative, enthusiastic people who also happen to be dear friends.

"Nowhere on Earth is safe again from my attentions. So far, we have, literally, hacked through mountain jungles to bring Music Planet listeners extraordinary music from some of the world's most isolated locations. And I cheerily risked incineration at a rocket festival in Thailand to take our Radio 3 audience into the fiery thick of the action.

"I have been even to Switzerland, the last country in which I expected to find myself. And, if listeners thought that yodelling was valuable only as a device to evict stragglers at the end of a party, or as a sure-fire way to secure an international novelty hit in 1956, the music we recorded in the Alps will – like so much to be heard in Music Planet – shatter such preconceptions and, simultaneously, delight and exhilarate."

James Parkin, producer, Music Planet says: "What makes Music Planet so exciting for me is that one minute you're listening to Cambodian hip-hop, and the next Swiss yodelling recorded in the Alps. And this is the music that people are making right now, all over the world, recorded especially for Radio 3."

Music Planet and Human Planet will be transmitted in the new year on Radio 3 and ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ One.

Notes to Editors

Radio 3 broadcasts classical music, jazz, world music, arts programmes and drama. Last year, Radio 3 broadcast over 600 complete concerts and operas from venues and festivals across the UK and beyond.

Radio 3 is the home of the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Proms and broadcasts every concert live. It supports composers, writers and new young performers and, last year, broadcast over 40 new drama productions.

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