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Leonardo Pavkovic: In prog-music scene, small is beautiful
Lifelong hipster: Music producer Leonardo Pavkovic at his office in New York
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Lifelong hipster: Music producer Leonardo Pavkovic at his office in New York. His recording company MoonJune Records continues to discover and release albums from non-mainstream musicians who deserve more listeners.
New York-based music producer Leonardo Pavkovic is the kind of guy who finds freedom in his niche rather than in the mainstream.
MoonJune Records represents the vision and passion of its founder, music producer Leonardo Pavkovic, for promoting progressive music.
Since MoonJune’s inception back in 2001, it has established itself as an authority within the progressive music niche, a very small market in which Pavkovic finds the most comfort in running his business.
“The niche market is the only place where you can remain free. In the mainstream market, you have no freedom,” Pavkovic told The Jakarta Post in an interview in Jakarta.
Pavkovic, through MoonJune, has consistently discovered and released music made by musicians that come from various cultural backgrounds. Through these discoveries and releases, Pavkovic is trying to explore the expanding boundaries of original and non-mainstream music.
With that being said, Pavkovic’s MoonJune does not sell the millions of albums that mainstream music production companies do, but this does not mean that the entrepreneur finds it difficult to keep his business afloat as he believes that being small is the reason why he can consistently garner devoted loyal fans both for his label and his artists.
“I am not interested in the mainstream. I don’t eat at Kentucky Fried Chicken [KFC], for example. I like to eat in a warung and that is the same concept in my business. It is a niche but there is always a market for it […] I am the label of the music that I like. I am not the label of how many copies I can sell. That is not important,” the producer, who has visited more than 80 countries in order to discover prog-music talent, said.
“Let me put it this way; if you have a small restaurant and you provide good food, you can still do business right? People come to you to eat your good food. People know KFC, Starbucks and others but some people might know a little place that provides good food and they prefer to go there than to the large chains. It’s the same concept.”
He said he knows his own niche, his market. In his label he has a lot of artists that are touring the world. “It is a small audience but people know each other. You cannot sell a few thousand records but that is not the point. The point is that we are creating art.”
Interestingly, there are a significant number of musicians from Indonesia within Pavkovic’s list of artists under his label.
Pavkovic has been a frequent visitor to Indonesia since his first visit to the country in 2003 but his introduction to the great potential of Indonesia’s progressive music scene started four years before.
“It all started by accident,” he said.
“In 1999, I was buying some prog-rock albums from a lot of companies in Italy. The guy that I was buying from recommended to me an Indonesian band called Discus. I told him to include the Discus CD in the package. I liked the CD and music and I opened the booklet and I saw two email addresses. One was the promoter Chico Hindarto and the other was Iwan Hasan, the guitar player,”
“I sent emails to both of them and they immediately answered. We started corresponding from time to time and for me it was very interesting to correspond with people from Indonesia, a place that I had never known before.”
Six months later, he recalled Iwan sending him an email saying that Discus would be playing in two small festivals in USA in North Carolina and in the San Francisco area. “They also wanted to have a show in New York for some friends and family but they did not know how to do it and I said I would try to book them a show. I then booked them a show at the Knitting Factory.”
Discus brought several other musicians when they finally met Pavkovic in New York. Pavkovic then developed a very close friendship with Riza Arshad, a keyboardist who was the first Indonesian to pick up the producer from the airport when he decided to visit Indonesia for the first time.
“It was midnight and Riza picked me up. He handed me some of his music and I liked his music. In 2006, he gave me a live recording of his band, Simak Dialog, and his previous albums. I then released Simak Dialog’s album called Patahan in 2007. It was the first Indonesian artist released under my label,” Pavkovic said.
“Riza introduced me to virtually everybody in the Indonesian prog-music scene like Dwiki Dharmawan and Dewa Budjana.”
The Simak Dialog album received a positive response and everybody was surprised to find out that there was such a good music from Indonesia, Pavkovic said.
“After that I released more and more Indonesian artists’ albums. It was kind of a natural process that started with friendships,” he said.
As of now, MoonJune has released more than a dozen of albums by Indonesian musicians and more will come out, such as Dwiki’s new album Pasar Klewer (Klewer Market).
While Pavkovic admits that he has fallen in love with Indonesia since his first visit, this is not the reason why he decides to produce dozens of albums for Indonesian progressive musicians such as Dwiki, Tohpati and Dewa.
“I release Indonesian artists’ albums not because they are Indonesians but because they are good,” Pavkovic said.
He also believes that there is more talent to be discovered in Indonesia and therefore he has a plan to move to Indonesia in the near future to discover them. “I am planning to move to Bali.”
— Photo courtesy of Leonardo Pavkovic
