Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.For years, the Cypriot musician Antonis Antoniou has been bringing together the musics of the eastern Mediterranean. Both with his bands, Monsieur Doumani and Trio Tekke, and as a solo artist, he has focused on the currents than run through his hometown, the divided city of Nicosia.His new project, Buzz’ Ayaz, is a deeper, grittier, more defiantly urban and less folkloric journey through the same territory. On their self-titled album, Antoniou plays the lute-like tsouras, a Cypriot version of the bouzouki, as usual, while his three bandmates bring new colourations. Briton Will Scott anchors the lower end of the sound on electric clarinet, giving the album something of the feel of Herbie Hancock’s Head Hunters. Manos Stratis doubles and jousts with the clarinet on bass synth and also plays organ, adding little baroque flourishes on “Fysa” that mark brief moments of respite from the relentlessness of Ulaş Öğüç’s drumming and Antoniou’s love of the wah-wah pedal.The opening track, “Buzzi Ayazi”, contains multitudes: a sour opening Anatolian riff on the tsouras, dubby stabbing chords on the organ, galloping drums and chanted a cappella vocals that phase and shift. “Running, we go look at the vines,” recounts Antoniou. “In my sleep I dress in their branches/The ones we planted with sorrow and laughter/And they spur me on to a flaming dance.”The Cypriot glam of “Efdji” is intoxicating and insistent. “Arkos” is told in the voice of an August wildfire, its smouldering, fidgety rhythms building to an incendiary close. “Meres”, meanwhile, has a late-summer listlessness, with sounds like buzzing flies matching its opening image of overripe citrus fruit left to rot on branches. It works its way through to teetering keyboard dances and a promise of “new days . . . full of drunkenness and kissing”.★★★★☆‘Buzz’ Ayaz’ is released by Glitterbeat
