Raw Vision Collective Scaled From a Jeff Mills Club Night to Kanye West's Only Southeast Asia Stadium Show

Six days before Ye played the biggest stage Southeast Asia has hosted all year, a choir stood in a pedestrian tunnel in Jakarta's business district and sang his catalogue over a kendang drum. Nobody watching needed to be told who had organized it.

Raw Vision Collective is the Jakarta outfit behind both that tunnel and the stadium show five days later, and the distance between the two says something about where Southeast Asian promoters are headed. In May, the same team put Jeff Mills behind the decks at a small Jakarta club for the 30th anniversary of his most famous mix. On October 24, they put Ye on a 360-degree production inside Gelora Bung Karno (GBK) Main Stadium, a 77,000-seat venue and his only confirmed stop in Southeast Asia and Oceania on this tour.

Getting to Yes

Raw Vision Collective describes itself less as a promoter than a "purpose-driven cultural collective," run by CEO Micha Nanda and marketing and communications lead Karen Tjahja. Landing Ye wasn't a cold booking. The team flew to the US to meet his camp directly and started showing up at his shows, a relationship-building process that eventually produced the blunt question every promoter dreads and needs: why should Ye come to Jakarta at all.

Answering it took more than a pitch deck. Raw Vision Collective flew to Almaty, Kazakhstan, to see Ye's Globe Stage production in person and meet two people close to him: singer Tony Williams, his cousin and longtime collaborator, and Andre Troutman. That trip is why, a few months later, it was Williams flying back into Jakarta himself, not just the production.

A Choir in a Tunnel

Raw Vision Collective announced the Jakarta show on Instagram on July 24. Raw Vision Collective spent the months after building toward it with a string of pre-show events across the region. The last of them, on October 18, was the strangest and the best: Williams produced and curated a piece called Tunnel Vision: An Ode to Ye, a choir performance staged inside a pedestrian tunnel in Jakarta's SCBD district, its arrangements threading Ye's catalogue through kendang, the traditional drum heard across Indonesian music. The full session later went up on Raw Vision Collective's YouTube channel.

What a Stadium Buys

"With Jakarta being the only announced Ye tour stop in Southeast Asia and Oceania, this is an important moment for Indonesia to demonstrate its readiness to host international live entertainment at scale," Tjahja said ahead of the show. "The demand we are seeing is coming not only from Indonesian fans, but from audiences across multiple international markets." Jakarta's governor, Pramono Anung, made a similar case in his own statement: "This is a very proud moment for Jakarta. With a major concert of this scale coming to Southeast Asia and Oceania and Jakarta being the only selected city in the region, it is also an opportunity for us to showcase Jakarta to the world." Ahead of the show, the cheapest ticket tier was already nearing sell-out.

It also does not make the two nights the same kind of achievement: a stadium show and a 30th-anniversary techno mix do not share an audience or a genre, and nothing about producing Ye's tour date obligates the collective to keep booking club nights for Jakarta's underground. What the five months between them prove is narrower, and still worth noting: a team built in Jakarta, without a major international promoter behind it, can run production at a scale most Southeast Asian collectives only get to watch from the crowd. Read what Raw Vision Collective built before this, back when the biggest name on their bill was a Detroit techno DJ instead of a GRAMMY winner with a globe for a stage set.

Cover photo: Micha Nanda and Karen Tjahja of Raw Vision Collective at the Ye Live in Jakarta activation, via Bandwagon Asia.