AnTrop

History

Andrei Tropillo’s first move toward what would become AnTrop came in 1976, when he tried to start a small record factory in a room he rented from Leningrad State University’s Geophysics department. That plan fell through, so he shifted his focus to building a recording studio instead. During the late 1970s, he earned money by managing bands and putting on concerts, then used that cash to buy sound recording gear. To get his hands on better studio facilities, Tropillo took a part-time gig supervising a sound recording program and teaching guitar at the Second House of Pupils and Pioneers in Okhta. Working under the House of Pioneers’ banner also let him collect discarded hardware from other places to outfit his studio. After the pupils went home for the night or left for summer break, Tropillo would bring in local rock musicians to record. The first groups to use his studio were Akvarium and Mify.

Between 1980 and 1981, a loose collective of musicians began gathering at AnTrop. These were people who liked recording work and could fill in on short notice when regular band members failed to show up. Unlike the stable lineups most bands kept for concerts, the studio saw musicians moving freely between groups. Sergey Kuryokhin was a frequent visitor who often contributed to recordings there.

In 1987, Tropillo got a job with the Leningrad branch of the state label Melodiya. In that role, he managed to release several albums that had already been recorded at AnTrop as vinyl LPs, but he couldn’t bring in bands to cut new material. While at Melodiya, he exploited the copyright rules of the era to put out classic Western rock albums by acts like The Beatles and Led Zeppelin. The records carried a note saying the recording was meant for radio broadcast, which, under Soviet law at the time, sidestepped copyright issues for commercial sale. For example, The Beatles records typically stated that the disc came “from the collection of Nikolai Vasin.”