Afrobanana takes place in a football stadium built into a hillside with Nicosia in the distance. That evening, the festivalgoers took a while to get going, but Buzz’ Ayaz soon had them in the palm of their hand, Antoniou on his custom-made electric cigar-box tzouras, Turkish Cypriot Ulas Oguc on the drums.
As dark and introspective as Buzz’ Ayaz might seem, explosive flashes are never far off. Just as Antoniou seems to be tapering off into nothingness, a moment later he rises to euphoric heights, grooving heavily.
“The people here need this darkness because it grounds them,” he told me after the show, “keeping their feet on the ground and promising the emotion and exuberance to come, which can only be appreciated in juxtaposition with its opposite. You could say it is mystical.”
Opening up about his latest syncretic project, Antoniou remarked: “Imagine – 20 years ago a band like Buzz’ Ayaz couldn’t exist”.
“There was no interaction at all,” he said. “There was fear. I remember that I was scared to cross over to the other side in the beginning, scared of the Other, the Turks, because there was always this propaganda that they were our enemy.”
With Buzz’ Ayaz, he said, “We want to build bridges with people and with audiences and try as much as from our own position, from a musical perspective, to bring the people together, at least at this level.”
Oguc, an actor and Buzz’ Ayaz’s charismatic, whippet-thin drummer, agreed: “Twenty years ago, the doors were closed,” he said.
“In Northern Cyprus it’s a little different than where we are now. The situation is different, and worse, in my case, because Northern Cyprus is isolated. Only Turkey recognises it. If you want to do anything, you have two options: either you are going to Istanbul or you are going to cross the border and go to south Cyprus and then the world.”
Antoniou acknowledged rapprochement would not be easy.
“On a political level building bridges can very difficult to do and very complicated,” he said.
“There’s Greece, there’s Turkey, there are a hundred things… There’s America also, and it’s they who decide what’s going to happen to a large and mysterious extent. So, it’s very hard. But at least on this level, on a more community level, I think it is very important to start.”
Buzz’ Ayaz play in Ljubljana, Slovenia on October 2; Zagreb, Croatia on October 3; Lukavac, Bosnia and Herzegovina on October 4 and Belgrade, Serbia on October 5. More details on the band’s website.
