Yasin Tropillo is a St. Petersburg–based sound engineer. He’s best known for his work at AnTrop, the independent studio/label founded by his uncle, the pioneering producer Andrei Tropillo. Andrei was a central figure behind many landmark recordings of the Leningrad rock scene. Yasin’s got a ton of credits under his belt. He’s done studio albums for underground and indie artists from the 90s to the 2000s, and more recently, he’s been doing sound design for big theater productions.
The Path into Sound
Yasin came of age inside the AnTrop orbit—first as an assistant at sessions and then at the console—absorbing the blend of DIY ingenuity and professional discipline that defined the late-Soviet/early-post-Soviet studio culture. For our international readers: AnTrop started as a semi-official setup that recorded bands connected to the Leningrad Rock Club and shared tapes through magnitizdat (home-duplication networks) before Russia’s recording industry opened up in the 1990s.
“I was a radio-electronics kid,” Yasin remembers. “Andrei asked me to help out in the studio, and I did. I started with the studio’s “second life” in the Okhta district in the late ’80s, where he ran a recording club. I was a regular there from 1986. I was still in school—eighth or ninth grade—coming over to Andrei’s to solder multicore snakes, hook up gear, and help with whatever surplus equipment we had.
One thing that’s often mentioned in Russian interviews is… Andrei said his sister married a veteran of the Algerian revolution, and their son Yasin was named after his father.
Studio Work (1990–2000s)
While Andrei Tropillo was busy putting out cassette releases and working for the state label Melodiya, he asked his nephew Yasin to set up a new studio. Yasin ended up overseeing the work, and he recorded a wave of new bands.
Andrei became a kind of north star for me. He got me hooked on the records he was making—I became a fan, I loved all of it. He’d give me a nudge at the right moments. I started out doing live sound at gigs.
I began doing studio recording myself with the studio’s relaunch on Bolshoy Prospekt: perestroika was underway, Andrei either got pushed out of the Palace of Pioneers or left on his own, and the studio moved to new rooms on the Petrograd Side. It stayed there until 2000.”
One of Yasin’s earliest high-profile gigs was with Ole Lukkoye (psychedelic/world-music innovators). The group’s first album, “Zapara,” was recorded and mixed at AnTrop in 1993, and current notes and later reviews explicitly name engineer Yasin Tropillo among the studio team. The record became a bit of a sensation in the Russian ethno-electronic and world music scenes.
In punk/alt-rock, Yasin recorded and mixed 2va Samolyota’s album “Ubiitsy sredi nas” (Killers Among Us, 1994) and issued it under his own imprint, Yasin Records—catalog number Yasin Records 001. This dual role (engineer + small-label publisher) captures the entrepreneurial reality of the mid-’90s scene.
He later contributed to PTVP (Poslednie Tanki v Parizhe), mixing tracks on the album “Geksagen” (2001), a key document of the band’s early-’00s sound.
A good example of Yasin’s end-to-end studio craft is Umka & Bronevichok – “At the AnTrop Studio” (2004), where he handled recording, mixing, and mastering; Andrei Tropillo is credited as producer. Fans often say it’s one of the best-sounding releases from that time.
Selected Yasin’s Albums
Relationship with Andrei Tropillo & AnTrop’s Legacy
In AnTrop, Andrei and Yasin’s roles often went well together. Andrei was in charge of picking the songs and making decisions about how to produce the show, while Yasin was at the desk. During the 2011 crisis around AnTrop’s high-profile dispute that escalated into a raid and equipment damage, Yasin was the first to discover the ransacked studio, called the police, and helped secure what could be saved—episodes documented in the press at the time.
Methods & Aesthetic
Yasin’s work covers the shift from analog tape-based studios in the late Soviet era to today’s hybrid setups. In practice, this has meant keeping the immediacy and “live” dynamics that people liked about Leningrad-school recordings, while using digital tools for editing and mastering as these became available in Russia during the 1990s and 2000s.
Theatre & Current Work
In the 2010s, Yasin started focusing more on theater sound. He’s worked as Deputy Head of the Sound Department at the Tovstonogov Bolshoi Drama Theatre (BDT) in St. Petersburg and has worked as a sound designer and engineer on BDT productions.
“I’ve been working in theatre for ten years now. In 2010, when the studio was taken over and I suddenly found myself out on the street, I had to freelance and hustle. The truth is, even if you know everyone in town—studios, engineers—they often had no work themselves: ‘sure, bring your clients and record here,’ but otherwise everyone was just sitting idle.
Then I drifted into theatre, and now I’m at the Bolshoi Drama Theater (BDT). It’s a different branch of sound, but it’s still sound: I run shows, take productions to opening night, and I head the BDT sound department.
It’s a great, large theatre—one of the biggest federal institutions in St. Petersburg. There’s a New Stage on Kamenny Island, and I’ve basically been working there since 2013.
I stay in touch with some musicians—sometimes we meet, I sometimes drop in at their gigs—but overall the era of hangouts and clubs has passed.”
- AnTrop is pretty much famous for being the studio/label that captured early recordings of bands like Aquarium, Kino, Alisa, Zoopark and others that are tied to the Leningrad Rock Club. Its founder, Andrei Tropillo, played a big role in Russian rock as an engineer/producer and later publisher; he passed away in 2024. Yasin’s career is right in line with that tradition.
© 2025 Artur Netsvetaev, interview with Yasin Tropillo
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