Behind the Decks with Sri Lankan-Australian Musician & Creative, Hazthi
Photo: Zane Qureshi
Tell me your name, age and a little bit about yourself:
My name is Hasthika Yapa. I shortened it to Hasthi the second I moved to Australia because it was just easier for people to pronounce. I am 22 years old, so funnily enough, a 2000s baby. Very often, people presume I am a lot older than I am, just due to the environments I work in and the work that I do.
The last year has been very exciting because I have taken a break from all of my study commitments and just focused more on the creative avenues I have neglected for a while. It has been a very fruitful time because I have had a lot of opportunities come to the table. Just about a year ago now is when I started working at the Leigh Street venue for Nevermind and Leigh Street Luggage that had just opened, and I worked with this guy Show, who was one of the bar directors, and we just got along from the get-go. He was instantly so open to all of these ideas I had, so it was a very opportunistic start in hospitality and in the creative realm of doing events and marketing there. I worked and managed that bar for about a year, and the networking capacity that came from that was bizarre. I met so many people and so many names, professions, etc.
How and when did you first get into music?
I have been musically oriented since I was a baby. But being brought up in Sri Lanka, the type of music and exposure to western music was minimal until I was probably 8-10 years old. I have been playing music since I was four years old. I used to play a range of percussion back in Sri Lanka and I used to do shows within and outside of school around the country. I was very into my drumming and into my rhythmic sounds.
I did these musical exams back home, which are a classification of music. I was doing them at a very, very young age. I remember being back in Sri Lanka in these exam rooms with men in their 30s-40s and being like a ten-year-old. I am super grateful to have had those opportunities growing up. Coming to Australia, I was exposed to all of Western music, and it’s one of those things that when you come here as a 12-year-old, you are so overstimulated by everything there is. There are so many sounds, genres, somethings are cool, some aren’t. So over the last 10 years, I have just been refining my sound. My relationship to music is so dear to me, and I am so passionate about it. Sound and music are something that drives me every day.
How did your family and friends support your early aspirations in pursuing music?
In terms of the support and backing I had, it was always profound, no matter what I did. I think I identified a creative outlook on life at a younger age than I was willing to admit. Coming from the culture that I am in, you are always geared towards academic focus, which makes sense because that’s usually the way that people back home will always try to cater their lives to get a good job… With my drumming back home, my parents have always been incredibly supportive. Like they went overseas to try and find the drums for me to play, nd get me the tutors that could tutor me, nd take me to these exams and shows around the country. It started offering and then branching off to where I am now, it‘s always like an insane level of support,ike with all the events I do, they’ll try to come through and show love. The support from family and friends recently has been genuinely so overwhelming because it is a recent development in the things I am doing in life in general.
So, seeing the way that my friends are willing to just come out and support it. I have friends who will be at every single set I play,o matter what day it is, if it's Wednesday, Friday, whenever. That always means the most.
Young Hasthi Yapa
Do you take any influence from your culture and heritage when you approach projects?
Oh absolutely! I have a profound amount of gratitude for the perspective I have in terms of everything that comes from my culture. Because having lived in Australia for ten years now I have a great understanding of the culture, the music, the history there but then I bring in all of the heritage and I guess the culture that I was exposed to for the first 12 years of my life and I always fall back on the unique perspective that it gives me. So when I think of my day to day, I take so much inspiration and motivation from the way that things were back home in Sri Lanka and whether it is certain sounds or depictions of art and celebration, there are so many things that I can always fall back on and relate to from the cultural stems for sure.
How do you describe the style of music that you make now?
Right now, I like to base the music that I am listening to and making very much on what I am going through in life. I find myself heavily focused on emotion-based sounds that amplify my feelings. You know if I am having a shit week I’ll be listening to some super sad stuff and if I am in the gym or getting ready for a show it’ll be go go go. At the moment, I am in a very celebratory time in my life. I am trying to get these venues and these events up and running, so I am mixing a lot of house music with lots of soulful stuff. I am enjoying it so much because from the production of the house music, I get to involve all these cultural drum sounds and percussion from around the world, whether it’s East Asian, African, European countries, whatever. It’s super fun because it brings a layer to the super sentimental production, and it sounds so good.
You’ve been here for 10 years now. What has your experience been like growing up as an Asian-Australian in SA?
I mean, I moved straight from Sri Lanka to Adelaide, and nothing can prepare you for the culture shock that you face when you’re moving from a South Asian country, and it's all you’ve known your whole life, to a Western country where everything is so different. As a 12-year-old, moving school was difficult because you know you’ve got to meet new people and make new friend groups and all, but moving countries, for the first 3-4 years, was pretty heavy. 12 is already a very confusing age so I just had to try and figure out what the fuck was going on. Being in middle school, you know you get picked on, bullied, you’re the new kid who has no idea what’s going on. Looking back, I retained so much gratitude for that process because it didn’t let me get comfortable in a situation where I shouldn’t have been too quick. The character development has been bizarre, but I have enjoyed it a lot because I went to school down south in McLaren Vale, so pretty far away, so leaving that mindset and moving to the city and growing my networks, and now I’m here. It was rough from the start, but I can look back and be happy about it because we made it work.
Photo: Zane Qureshi
How did you get into DJing?
I love talking about this, haha. I started djing when I was in year 8 or year 9 because it was something that just fascinated me so much. After moving to Australia, I was exposed to western music where I found and fell in love with house music, and this was in that spinning records era where Tomorrowland had just started, and I would sit there and watch all these after movies and get so hyped up. So I’m thinking, like, how can I start djing, how can I learn how to do this? So anyone who started djing at that time at a young age would’ve had some sort of app on their iPod touch or whatever, and would try to mix on them. But I had some great influences from the guys in the years above, one of them I still work with to this day, with the OERWOUD events at Thirsty Tiger. But they had some controllers that they would take to some house parties, and I would do my best to try and rock up and do a little mix and just watch and learn. So the roots of djing started when I was 13-14 years old. After high I was able to buy myself a little DJ controller that sat in my bedroom, and that thing got smashed.
