Indonesia 6 grew out of two earlier, informally documented Bandung student bands, Coops Rhythm Section and Rooster, before settling into the lineup that would carry the name into the history books. All six members were students at Elfa Music Studio in Bandung, the influential arranging school run by composer and vocal-group leader Elfa Secioria, and it was Secioria himself who is credited with pulling the group together as a dedicated act: keyboardists Yovie Widianto, Bubby Iradiadi, and Yani Danuwijaya, bassist Desi Arnaz Lahat, drummer Hentriesa Yulmedia, and percussionist-vocalist Iwan Wiradz. Before adopting the "Indonesia 6" name, the group performed informally under the name "Kahitna" — a detail that matters later. Sources differ slightly on the exact formation date: Wikipedia's account and several Indonesian retrospectives date the group's lineage to 1984, while Discogs's own artist profile dates "Indonesia 6" specifically to 1987, the year the sextet was assembled under that name for its Tokyo debut. Both are likely correct in their own way — 1984 for the earliest incarnation of the group, 1987 for the point at which it became "Indonesia 6."

That 1987 turning point was the Yamaha Light Music Contest, an international event also referred to as the World Band Explosion, held at Nippon Budokan in Tokyo. Multiple Indonesian-language sources describe an enormous preliminary field — thousands of Japanese entrants and thousands more from abroad — narrowed down to a final round of 22 groups representing 11 countries, with Indonesia 6 the Indonesian and Southeast Asian representative. The band's set reportedly reworked the jazz standard "All the Things You Are" into a Latin-inflected samba arrangement, a choice contemporary write-ups compare to the fusion vocabulary of Casiopea, Spyro Gyra, and Level 42. The performance won two individual awards at the contest: Best Keyboard Player, credited to Yani Danuwijaya, and Best Bassist, credited to Desi Arnaz Lahat — both plausible given that the band fielded three keyboardists and a single bass chair, concentrating exactly the kind of technical spotlight those categories reward.

The band's only studio album, a self-titled LP, followed two years later: recorded across three Jakarta studios (Syaelendra Studio, Prosound Studio, and Midilab Studio) and released in July 1989 on the small independent label Team Records (catalog number 026), on cassette only. The eleven-track record leaned on a roster of guest vocalists rather than the instrumentalists singing lead themselves — Yana Julio, Harvey Malaihollo, Fairuz Hussein, Ferina Widodo, and Lita Zen all appear across different tracks — with the instrumental core of Widianto, Iradiadi, Danuwijaya, Lahat, Yulmedia, and Wiradz handling composition and backing. Several sources describe "Fatamorgana," the album's B1 track, as having circulated as a single as early as 1988, ahead of the LP itself, and it remains the song most associated with the band today, having been performed on Indonesian state television (TVRI) in 1989. Indonesia 6 disbanded around 1990 as most members moved on to other pursuits, though Hentriesa Yulmedia is reported to have continued as a professional musician; a planned second album was never completed.

Indonesia 6's lasting significance to Indonesian pop history runs through Yovie Widianto. The name the group used informally before the Tokyo trip — Kahitna — was revived by Widianto in 1986 for a new, separate band project that went on to become one of Indonesia's most commercially successful pop-jazz acts, still active today. Indonesian-language sources consistently describe Kahitna as "a spinoff of Indonesia 6" and Indonesia 6 as the group that gave Widianto his start; the two bands' active periods appear to have overlapped for a few years in the late 1980s, though this project could not independently confirm the exact mechanics of Widianto's involvement in both simultaneously. Indonesia 6 itself resurfaced briefly in November 2017 for a 30th-anniversary reunion show at Hard Rock Cafe Jakarta, reported at the time as a first step toward new recorded material, though no further release has been confirmed since.

Indonesia 6's music sat squarely in the Latin-tinged, keyboard-forward jazz-fusion idiom that defined a wave of Indonesian bands in the 1980s — Discogs tags the one album's genre as Jazz, Latin, Funk/Soul, and Pop, with styles listed as Funk, Fusion, Jazz-Funk, and Ballad, a spread that reflects a band built to back vocalists as comfortably as it stretched out instrumentally. The group's calling-card arrangement — turning the standard "All the Things You Are" into a samba — signals a fusion lineage indebted to Japanese and American jazz-funk acts like Casiopea, Spyro Gyra, and Level 42, filtered through a three-keyboard frontline that gave the band an unusually dense, layered harmonic sound for a working pop-session outfit. That combination — jazz-schooled musicianship (via Elfa Secioria's arranging pedagogy) applied to commercial vocal-pop songwriting — placed Indonesia 6 alongside labelmates and contemporaries in Jakarta's late-1980s fusion scene, and its members' subsequent careers (most visibly Widianto's) carried that hybrid sensibility directly into Indonesian mainstream pop.