Ananda Ganegoda, a veteran music producer and businessman who shaped four decades of Sinhala recorded music, has died at the age of 80.
Ganegoda entered the cassette music industry in 1980 through the Sing Lanka production house, at a point when cassettes were displacing vinyl as the dominant format for Sinhala music and the commercial recording business in Sri Lanka was being rebuilt around them.
A long list of collaborators
Over his career he produced recordings for a wide span of the country’s best-known vocalists, among them:
- Pandit W. D. Amaradeva
- Sangeeth Nipun Professor Sanath Nandasiri
- Dr Nanda Malini
- Visharada Gunadasa Kapuge
- Visharada Malani Bulathsinghala
- Professor Dayaratna Ranatunga
- Clarence Wijewardena
- Sunil Edirisinghe
- T. M. Jayaratne
- Neela Wickramasinghe
- Mariazelle Goonetilleke
- Desmond de Silva
- Nihal Nelson
- Karunarathna Divulgane
- Malkanthi Nandasiri
- Deepika Priyadarshani
The range spans classical-influenced Sinhala song, the baila and pop traditions, and the guitar-led sound Wijewardena is credited with introducing — an unusually broad catalogue for a single producer.
Funeral arrangements
His remains lie at his residence on Templers Road, Mount Lavinia, from 1:00 PM on Saturday (26) for the public to pay their respects. The final rites are to be performed at the Mount Lavinia Cemetery at 6:00 PM on Sunday (27).
Not reported
The report does not give a cause of death or say where he died, and no surviving family members are named. It does not state how many recordings or titles Sing Lanka released, whether the label is still operating, or what business interests he held outside music. No tribute from the artists he worked with or from a music industry body is carried, and the label’s name appears as “Sing Lanka” in this account — other reports render it as a single word, “Singlanka”.
