A new vinyl pressing plant was recently opened in West Jakarta. Photo by PHR
The word ‘frontier’ can mean a region that forms the margin of settled territory and that neatly sums up the position of vinyl records in the history of Indonesia’s recording industry.
Truth be told, vinyl records have never been the primary format by which Indonesian consumers get enjoyment from musical recordings. Even when wax was the format of choice in the global music industry, vinyl records in Indonesia were, at best, a curiosity item among Indonesia’s affluent class.
There are a lot of historical inaccuracies in the propaganda film Pemberontakan G30S-PKI (The Indonesian Communist Party 30 September Mutiny), but if there’s one thing that the film got right it was its depiction of anti-Western sentiment, especially the torching of Beatles records.
Yes, ordinary Indonesians did not listen to music on vinyl records and the anecdote that only the children of Soekarno and their friends in Menteng could keep a Beatles collection on their shelves was probably true.
In fact, Indonesia, has never had a critical mass of users to maintain the existence of a profitable domestic venture in vinyl production.
In the 1920s and 30s, the early period of electrical recordings, the standard practice was for major music firms like the German firm Carl Lindström (Odeon) and Beka and Columbia to send audio engineers to record vernacular music in third world countries. Then they pressed them in large factories, mostly concentrated in Britain, Germany and the United States.
And it was records pressed in those metropolitan centers, especially Germany, that were then shipped back out to Indonesia, to meet demand from the country’s affluent middle class.
During the dramatic explosion of the global record industry in the late 1920s, record sales in the Dutch East Indies reached 1.9 million discs in 1929, before nosediving to 500,000 discs in 1933. However, some researchers have been more moderate in their estimates. Philip Yampolsky puts the figures at just 18,500 unique commercial recordings issued in Dutch East Indies market before 1942.
In any case, the promise of a sizeable market for recorded music was enough for airforce general and musical impresario Soejoso “Mas Yos” Karsono to set up Indonesia’s first indigenous record label Irama and its subsidiary pressing plant, the first ever built in Indonesia.
Irama went on to become Indonesia’s biggest record label in the 1950s and the 1960s, releasing groundbreaking music from artists and musicians who would soon become household names in the country, like Bing Slamet, Titiek Puspa, Sam Saimun and Oslan Husein.
The pressing plant business is a different story though. From 1961 to 1963 – arguably the peak of Soejoso’s power, when he became a close friend to Soekarno—Irama produced as many as 30,000 records per month. But by the end of 1966, it only pressed just 1,000-2,000 discs per month and sold only 500 per month, amid an economic slump.
During the 1960s, when inflation rose to 635.3%, the highest rate in the history of Indonesia, the average growth of GDP per capita for the period of 1960-1967 had declined to 0.25%. The Soekarno regime collapsed and, due to financial difficulties, Irama – both the label and pressing plant – ceased production in 1967.
By then, the only other pressing plant operating in Indonesia was the state-run Lokananta, which ran its operation from Surakarta in Central Java. But with majority of discerning music fans switching to cassette tapes, the managers of this plant decided to cease operations in 1974.
Major recording studios, especially those based in Jakarta, claimed that they ran pressing plants in Jakarta but there was evidence to suggest otherwise. With cassette tapes dominating the market, there was no incentive for major labels like Musica and Remaco to press large quantities of discs. Instead, these labels pressed small-run vinyl records at factories in Singapore, claiming their output to be an in-house production.
Some of other tricks employed by these labels were to press an album at a Singaporean record plant, like the one operated by Life Records, and ship the records back to Jakarta under a different label, to make it look as if the album was put out by a foreign label.
These small quantities of discs were then distributed as radio promotional copies, and have now become collector’s items, fetching exorbitant figures on the second-hand market. A mint copy of the soundtrack to the Teguh Karya-directed 1977 film Badai Pasti Berlalu (The Storm Will Pass) can now be yours for 75 million rupiah (AUD 7,400).
Whatever the tricks used, vinyl records fell by the wayside in the early 1980s, especially with the arrival of the sleek and better-sounding compact disc (CD). The story of vinyl records should have ended more than 40 years ago.
But now a sequel is coming with the opening of new pressing plant operated jointly by the Jakarta-based indie label Elevation Records and record store and distributor PHR, allowing bands, artists and label to press their music at a facility in West Jakarta.
With a capacity of 3,000 discs per day, PHR Pressing has the ambition of also catering to the pressing needs of other countries in Southeast Asia, especially Singapore, Malaysia and the Philippines, which now have no pressing plants of their own.
Since August last year, the new facility has pressed more than 60 titles and it is fitting that in anticipation of its first anniversary this year, its heavy-duty engine is now working overtime to press the remastered version of Badai Pasti Berlalu.
And may be this time the format will finally break into the mainstream.
