Photos courtesy of lokananta

Founded in 1956, first as a music studio and later a pressing plant for vinyl records, Lokananta Studio should not have survived this long. None of its contemporaries, big names like Indra Records, Remaco Records or Irama Tara, record labels who dominated the country’s popular music scene in the 1960s and the 1970s, are still around today.

In fact, as a state-owned enterprise Lokananta declared bankruptcy in 2001 after years in a bureaucratic mess. In 1999, the administration of president Abdurrahman “Gus Dur” Wahid decided to disband the Information Ministry, to which Lokananta was attached throughout the years of its operation. Without a ministry to oversee its operations, the government decided to liquidate the studio but no follow-up was made on the decision, until in 2001 the state-owned Printing Press Company (PNRI) found out that the studio was worth saving, especially for treasures hidden inside its warehouses in the form of 40,000 vinyl records with many of the nation’s traditional songs as well as the more than 5,000 master tapes of them. The PNRI officially acquired the company in 2001 and soon after oversaw not only its efforts to stay relevant but its impressive turnaround.

The PNRI’s decision to acquire Lokananta turned out to be the right one without which the country would lose a significant chunk of its (musical) history. If the government decided to let Lokananta go bankrupt in the late 1990s and allowed master tapes and vinyl records of the country’s modern and traditional songs to change hands, Indonesia could not provide evidence that Malaysia’s national anthem “Negaraku” (My Country) was in fact an adaptation from a folk song “Terang Boelan” (Full Moon), composed by one of the country’s maestros Saiful Bahri; it was recorded at the Jakarta studio of state-owned radio station RRI in 1956 and pressed on wax at Lokananta in March 1965.

Or when Malaysia again made a claim in 2007 that the song “Rasa Sajange” (Feeling Love) belonged to the country, Lokananta again provided authentic proof that the song was an Indonesian folk song from Ambon, which was first pressed on wax in Lokananta in 1962, part of a compilation of folk songs titled The 4th Asian Games: Souvenir from Indonesia, given as handouts to athletes competing in the multi-sports event.

Lokananta’s warehouse also holds some of the most important pieces of the country’s history from the master tapes of the original national anthem “Indonesia Raya,” (Indonesia the Great), the audio recording of a speech given by Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev when he visited the country in 1960 as well as the vinyl copies of records containing some of the most legendary speeches from the nation’s first president Sukarno.

But having control and access to the country’s musical treasure trove would not save Lokananta from irrelevance, especially with thousands of vinyl records crammed inside a barely airconditioned room and under constant assault from humidity of the tropical climate. With its budget kept at a bare minimum, Lokananta continues to struggle in preserving the country’s musical legacy and it is only through perseverance, creativity and hard work from the studio’s 19 personnel that it could survive, grow and thrive in difficult circumstances, especially today when the music industry is undergoing a massive transformation prompted by the rise of the internet,

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In fact in its latest effort to transform itself, Lokananta has decided to embrace the internet. Earlier this year, Lokananta launched an online library at www.lokanantamusic.com from which music fans could stream hundreds of songs from its massive catalogue.

Archivists and sound engineers at Lokananta have performed a commendable job of remastering music preserved on wax and turned them into a digital format in clear and pristine audio quality. With an expensive-looking website full of smart graphic design which is easy to navigate, the website could be a reliable source for anybody interested in digging deeper into Indonesia’s glorious musical part. While the online archive website of Irama Nusantara focuses more on the genre of rock and pop, Lokananta’s archive boasts an impressive amount of Indonesian traditional and folk music as well as a more exotic genre like Middle Eastern music, performed by a full-fledged orchestra made up of all-Indonesian instrumentalists. The digital version of the old songs are now also available on streaming services like Spotify and Deezer.

Going digital is the latest effort from Lokananta to gain relevance in today’s changing musical landscape. In the past few years, Lokananta has successfully run a public relations campaign to brand itself as the country’s equivalent of the Abbey Road studio where legendary bands like The Beatles, Pink Floyd and Oasis recorded some of their best albums. With its pressing plant for vinyl already decommissioned in the early 1980s, and its cassette and CD duplication service running at limited capacity, the only pride that Lokananta could still claim is its state-of-the-art recording studio with a massive soundproofed isolation room in which even the largest traditional Javanese music band Karawitan could occupy.

Some of the country’s trendiest indie bands, including Efek Rumah Kaca, White Shoes and the Couples Company, Senyawa and Pandai Besi, have all recorded their music at Lokananta and used the tagline “Recorded at Lokananta” as a marketing ploy to attract fans into buying their releases.

With limited equipment at its disposal, Lokananta has also successfully ridden the wave of trends in music. After dismantling its pressing plant for vinyl in the late 1980s, Lokananta kept its cassette duplication machine in operation despite the popularity of compact disc. And now with cassette tapes enjoying a resurgence and gaining popularity among members of the hipster crowd, Lokananta is the go-to destination for trendy indie bands eager to release their music on cassette tapes.

Lokananta’s savvy public relation campaign wrapped up earlier this month with the publication of a coffee-table book, which chronicles the journey from its humble beginnings into a musical powerhouse before stumbling and reinventing itself. The book is another smart marketing ploy aimed a self-mythologizing in the vein of the world’s musical icon like Abbey Road, New York’s famed CBGB bars or Berlin’s Kleistpark area, where David Bowie and Iggy Pop used to live in the late 1970s.

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