Dojihatori and their view on band hiatus

Dojihatori is an Indonesian indie britpop band from Yogyakarta. After won the LA Light indie festival and released two albums, Dojihatori seems to set a great start, and should be heading toward their next successful album. But after two years, there’s no news on their upcoming new album. Why is that?I myself managed to interview Dojihatori’s guitarist and frontman, Windho. So let’s hear about the band’s hiatus and their plan to release a new album soon.Tell us about Dojihatori’s hiatus? And when you guys are planning to make a comeback?
Well Dojihatori is indeed on a break, we’re relaxing to be exact. It’s different back then when was in college, we used to be a “hard-working” band. It’s a different era, so we’re kind of have different goals. We used to make new materials and keep practicing, and we often perform on stage, even though there were just one or two people that come to our show. As a new band, we want to achieve many things at that time, wrote songs, played it on stage, released an album, and performed at any events and shows. We’ve been through that phase since 2000, and many things have changed since then. Our band members are now busy with work. And of course the distance, we don’t stay at the same city like we used to. So this is what we called “relaxing”, even though we still try to be productive. Several person of our band member is now married and has a family, so we must settle a priority and, in this matter, Dojihatori has to step down.

Do you guys have any plan to release a new album?
We planned to release a new album sometime in last year, but we have to pending the production process because of the marriage of our vocalist, so it’s kind of affecting the recording process. So our new plan is to finish the recording this year and release the new album next year.

Is there any difference between the new upcoming album and the last two albums?
On our previous albums, most of the songs were written by me and Rinto (our bassist), and Rinto took a bigger role on dealing with our song lyrics. But, on our new album, Yuma (our vocalist) and Feri (our drummer) are keen to put some of their ideas to the songs, so it will be different in term of the album’s taste and sound of the songs. On our previous albums, we put lots of distortion to the sound of our guitar. But on our new album, we try to sound more “vintage”. We try to explore different path but we still want to keep our “old” taste from the previous albums.

In your opinion, what’s the best album of 2011 so far?
I’m afraid we have to pass this question, we’re still busy listening to The Beatles, hahaha.

Is there any peculiar band that you guys wanna share a stage with?
The Who, The Jam, Stone Roses, The Kooks, we think they’re talented.

(Natalia)