Doing it their way

D'TAP or ‘Different Tap’ has started to leave their footprints on the Sri Lankan charts. Dayan Aravinda, the lead vocalist and Tharindu Roshan, the music producer and the back-up singer of the band spoke to Isuri Kaviratne of the Mirror Magazine about their latest hits.

D'TAP is a new name to music lovers in Sri Lanka. Yet, your songs have reached people quite fast. What do you think about your songs making the music charts?

Tharindu: Both our songs, “Mad Love” and “Neth Konin” are on the Y FM Top Chart. “Neth Konin” was among the top ten songs as well and we released its visual this January. Our songs are being broadcast on many TV and Radio channels. So, naturally, we feel happy about making a successful video production.

Dayan: We wanted to do something new and something good. And we are happy about the final output. We are still schooling, and are from Matara without many contacts but we came so far, didn't we? And we have our own studio, D'TAP studio, in Matara so we are confident that we can go further as well.

And you are working on your first album as well?

T: Yes. We have done around 15 tracks at the moment and we are planning to release the album by the end of this year.

D:We just have to complete the tracks by fine-tuning them a bit more. But before that we plan to release at least two more songs and we are working on it these days.

Although only both of you are the better known faces of the band, there are some others involved as well?

T: Yes. Pramudith is the rapper of the group, but he went to America for higher studies. He'll be coming back to do the rest of the tracks and to finish the album.

D: And Dimuthu who wrote the lyrics of “Neth Konin” too is not performing at the moment because of his studies. But most probably he too will join in to release the album at the end of this year.

All four of you are from Rahula College, Matara. How did you get together to set up the band?

T: Well, Pramudith and I studied Western Music together and thought about forming a band. Dayan and Dimuthu studied Eastern Music. But we saw each other performing on the same stage at school. So, finally we thought of starting the band together.

D: ...we did a song together for a school concert and that started our long journey.

Did you face any clashes or difficulties when doing the tracks?

D: We’ve known each other from school, so naturally, we had a better understanding about each other even before we started the band. We were free to discuss the problems that might occur during the process. That made a lot of things easy for us to make the final output better.

How many concerts have you performed at so far?

T: Our first concert was at the Urumaya Down South Concert. We performed together with Centigradz there. And then we performed at the Urumaya Colombo Concert as well with them at Bishop's College. Our third show was Ray of Hope. We did that to raise funds for Maharagama Cancer Hospital in the Maharagama Youth Centre.

Is there anybody you want to thank?

T: We want to thank our parents, music teachers at the school, friends and especially, our visual director Vasawa Baduge and the crew.

D: Also, the camera director Amila Nishantha and friends. A lot of people helped us with the visuals and so on and we want to thank them as well though it's difficult to name everyone. And we want to thank all those who encouraged us to come this far.