Yess

Tape label from Bandung Indonesia. Active from late 70s to late 80's. The name and design of the J-cards was inspired by the group Yes. until 1988, Yess’ cassettes (and so as others) were never considered as pirated products Yess paid tax to Indonesian government There was a legal tax label attached to each cassette covers, the label was issued by ASIRI (the Indonesian Association of Recording Industry) State did not adjudge this act of copying foreign vinyl records as piracy In this sense, both Yess and its consumers did not commit any act of piracy At the time, everything was pirated – nothing was official. history : From 1975 to 1988, in the city of Bandung, Indonesia, the output of a record label called Yess Records was responsible for inspiring a generation of Indonesian listeners to pursue a musical life with progressive rock at the center. However, calling Yess a “label” doesn’t necessarily compute with its day-to-day operations: Their output was composed almost entirely of bootlegs, created by recording existing releases onto a C-60 or C-90 Maxell cassette. For the three owners – A Fung, Ian Arliandy and Ihok, about whom little is known – audio quality was a high priority, even if following international copyright law was not. But with a total of 731 releases over Yess’s lifespan, the cassette brokers played an essential role in introducing its local customers to truly weird music – Marillion, Pendragon, Tangerine Dream, King Crimson and, of course, their namesake Yes among them – with the bluish-green covers of their cassettes still sitting on the shelves of unassuming record shops or nostalgic collectors throughout Indonesia. Initially founded between 1972 and 1973 by A Fung under the name Diamond Records, it wasn’t long before Ian Arliandy was invited in as a curator. While A Fung primarily managed the re-recording process and Ihok took care of the store’s day-to-day business, Arliandy tended to a specific curatorial vision: “I really want to make [Yess] all about progressive music. My mission was to spread this kind of music. The more unintelligible progressive music gets, the better,” he once said. Generally, the musical interests of Indonesians throughout the 1970s didn’t really expand beyond classic rock – the Led Zeppelins and Deep Purples of Western pop culture – or dangdut, the popular rhythmic music influenced by Arabic and Malay structures. Due to tight regulations under the authoritarian government, television was nothing more than a channel of propaganda and print publications needed a specific permit and, as a result, music didn’t travel fast. For Yess, the word “alternative” was commonly tossed around: their brand of prog and avant-garde music was the alternative to pop, just as cassettes were the alternative to rare and expensive records. Yess were more than just purveyors of prog, though, and its restless work re-recording choice imports from the US, UK, Netherlands, Singapore and beyond became less constrained by genre as their output increased.