Lian is the most famous brand ambassador for the city of Jakarta that you probably don’t know about.

CNN Travel said he is “the go-to guy for foreigners who want to discover Indonesian history and the influences behind the country’s modern identity”.

“He has a cunning knack of quickly figuring out what you wanted and producing attuned piles of discs,” CNN Travel wrote in 2011. In 2015, CNN included Lian’s shop as one of 10 best shopping destination for travelers, in the same category with New York’s Other Music and Chicago’s Dusty Groove.

Many more foreign publications appeared to have been intrigued by the praise. “In the same street as the Antique/Flea Market [Menteng] you will find this tiny store. It’s so small it looks more like a storage […] it does not have a name, just a number painted on the boarding,” record store directory recordjunkie.com writes about Lian’s shop in its edition of the world’s best record stores.

Facebook caught the bug in 2015 and decided to profile him as a character for its television ads to promote its non-profit Internet.org, Mark Zuckerberg’s initiative designed to offer affordable internet access in developing countries. The ads were produced by Facebook’s in-house creative agency, The Factory. The spot was aired in Canada and Australia and automatically played when you opened the Facebook website a while ago.

All the publications made him something of an internet celebrity. These days, backpackers are not the only ones who make the obligatory visits to his record store tucked between the upscale neighborhood of Menteng and the business district of Cikini in Central Jakarta. Many high-profile musicians who performed for the Jakarta crowd always check out his store and after bagging some of the country’s rarest old LPs, merrily snap a selfie with him. Recently, Lian nearly broke the internet when a picture of him taking a selfie with blue-haired Katy Perry circulated on social media.

Like-minded: Three members of Icelandic post-rock band Sigur Rós snap a group photo with Lian during their stopover in Jakarta for a show in 2013. (Courtesy of twitter.com)
Three years ago, fans of the Icelandic post-rock outfit Sigur Rós turned green with envy when a group photo of band members with Lian also circulated on the internet.

But Lian is probably the last person to know about his internet fame.

He remains computer illiterate and that is the way he has been running the record store for the past 40 years. He inherited it from his father, Amil Rudin Nasution, who set up the store in the late 1950s and ran the establishment with the help of Lian, who initially thought that he was just having fun in the store; cleaning records, dropping needles into the grooves and cranking up the volume. The internet was the latest technological progress that Lian has witnessed throughout more than 40 years of running the record store,. He has seen the demise of vinyl, portable 7-inch player, 8-track tape and recently compact disc (CD).

Now with the resurgence of vinyl as the most-preferred music-carrying format, Lian’s journey has come full circle.

“I remember selling used vinyl records for Rp 200 [12 cents] back in the late 1960s,” Lian said in a recent interview at his store, an interview that was interrupted by the din and chaos that came from the traffic snaking along the one-lane Jl. Surabaya, one of the main arteries connecting Senen and Manggarai, both busy, working-class neighborhoods in Central Jakarta.

Today, he makes most of his profits from selling original copies of Indonesian classics, such as Koes Plus’ ‘To The So-called The Guilties, AKA’s Shake Me, Shark Move’s Gedhe Chokra and the Ariesta Birawa Group’s first album, which have become some of the most sought-after records following the release of the Those Shocking, Shaking Days compilation by the Los Angeles label Now-Again, which introduced some of the most incendiary funk, progressive and psychedelic rock from the Indonesian music scene in the 1960s and 1970s to an international audience.

In doing business, Lian stuck to the old ways, which involved buyers coming and thumbing through his collection personally or having their order delivered to their hotels by ojek (motorcycle taxis).

“Last time I got an order, I had to make the delivery to the airport as the buyers were rushing to catch their flight,” he said.

In the drawer of the table upon which he put his turntable and amps, Lian keeps a notebook that tracks his inventory and the cash flow. In recent years there’s little that Lian could write down in the notebook as store traffic reached an all-time low, since more record shops have cropped up in other parts Jakarta, the most prominent being the hip Santa Market and the strategically placed Blok M Plaza second-hand music market.

CHOSEN VENUE: Wahyu “Acum” Nugroho and his wife Nia took their pre-wedding photos among the records inside Lian Nasution’s record store. (Courtesy of Wahyu “Acum” Nugroho)

Recently, store traffic has bounced back thanks to a relentless social media campaign and the devotion shown by some of some of his regulars from the vinyl collectors community, who continued to stand by him during lean times.

“He is the most influential person who helped shape my collecting habit, especially when I started doing this,” said Wahyu “Acum” Nugroho, a vinyl enthusiast who runs the website gilavinyl.com.

Acum was so indebted to Lian that he shot his pre-wedding photos at the store with his wife wearing a retro style dress and toying with seven-inch records.

Today, Acum continues to frequent Lian’s store and goes home with at least two records in his hands. “There’s always interesting music in his store and he offers it at a low price,” said Acum, who also fronts the critically acclaimed indie rock band, Bangkutaman.

There are countless others in the city whose lives have been enriched by Lian: Music fans and members of the hipster community who acknowledge his contribution in a number of ways.

Recently, the hipster-oriented web magazine whiteboardjournal.com assigned him to make a playlist of old Indonesian music culled from his analog collection, effectively giving him the role of elder statesman, if not a patron saint of the musically literate crowd.

Before that, Jakarta-based DJ Shunsuke Izumoto paid the ultimate tribute by putting Lian’s face on T-shirts that he made available in his Mondo café in Kemang, which became a hot item among tourists.

“Initially, I did not approve of the plan, but they insisted and that made them more determined,” Lian said with his trademark grin.