Tropillo grew up in a household with a musical and technical background, and he got into foreign records through his brother-in-law. He also got into electronic music in school. In college, he put that curiosity to work, making his own records with a lab press and homemade plating:

“While I was at the university, I found a 400-ton lab press and made the molds myself. I’ve figured out how to create the matrices: you take a record, remove the label, coat it with a thin layer of silver in a vacuum chamber, then build up nickel [in a homemade galvanic bath].

Table of Content

The process was pretty basic and secret—they used speeches by Lenin and other party officials as source material—and the result was small 10-inch discs. After about 100 copies, he switched from small-batch pressing to organizing concerts.

Underground shows and first releases

Boris Grebenshchikov introduced him, he met Andrey Makarevich’s Mashina Vremeni, and he staged a three-day underground festival (1976). He also began taping shows.

“It was a three-day underground rock festival. My father, who was 65 at the time, was stunned. He said, ‘I was sure that once the concert ended, the doors would open, there’d be vans outside, and they’d quietly load us all in!’”

By 1978–79, he was putting together early magneto-albums in small art-wrapped runs (~208 copies for one title), and he was learning recording largely on his own:

“There wasn’t much good literature back then, and there still isn’t. I studied the subject on my own, mostly the theory side of things like stereophony. Later on, around 1982, I found a Czech book with some practical techniques. I also learned a lot about overdubs from Viktor Dinov at Melodiya. Everything I know, I learned myself.”

Andrey Tropillo in a center, 1980s Soviet Union, capturing the spirit of Soviet rock culture with a lively outdoor gathering.

The first studio: House of Pioneers

In 1979, after getting an 8-track AMPEX, Tropillo set up and taught a recording club in a spare room at a House of Pioneers. He personally insulated the room and laid the floors. The gear list grew—Tembr-2M, MEZ tube machines, Hungarian STM, a Czech transistor console from Melodiya, S-90 monitors with Amphiton amps, the AMPEX 8-track, and a Dynacord 280 reverb he bought off Makarevich’s manager for 2,500 rubles. Friends at Melodiya (especially Yuri Morozov) quietly lent Studer decks and a multichannel desk, and state bodies each year “wrote off” tube equipment that Tropillo salvaged and repaired.

Afternoons were for kids; evenings were for bands:

“I came to run the ‘Acoustics and Sound Engineering’ club. Twice a week. At first, the kids just copied the tapes I had—Western and Russian—and took them home. Those with an ear learned guitar. And in the evenings the long-haired musicians came.”

Those “long-haired musicians” included Mify and Aquarium; soon after, Kino, Zoopark, and others joined in. As Boris Grebenshchikov remembered, the first mixer looked like a guerrilla detonator—but it worked.

Soviet rock band recording session in a studio, showcasing iconic era in music history.

From tape culture to the idea of the album

Tropillo put out eight Aquarium albums, early Kino, Zoopark’s debut and third, and Kuryokhin’s Insect Culture, among others, through the early 1980s. These are now considered classics. In a time when “albums” usually meant reels that fans and semi-professional “writers” duplicated by hand, Tropillo argued for the album as a work.

“I realized an album is a conceptual selection in a set order, with proper artwork… An album is like a living organism… The best way to connect directly with kindred spirits is the album.”

He didn’t want to treat studio sessions like taped concerts. To get around weak arrangements or player limitations, he’d change the band line-up on the spot and get around gear limits with layered overdubs on two tracks and guitar compressors as vocal processors. He sometimes played parts himself:

“To change an uninteresting arrangement, I’d bring new musicians into the group being recorded… I played recorder, sang, picked up a guitar if someone needed subbing.”

Producer’s creed

By his mid-1980s stride he spoke about studio leadership:

“As a producer, you’ve got to keep trimming the fat. In rock, that’s tough—every musician is really soloing. In your records, you’re the one who allocates the spaces. The producer and the engineer are in charge of that. If rock is a group effort, the album is a group of group efforts, and the producer is the leader. At a concert, the engineer is the scapegoat; on a record, he’s the boss.”

Vintage Soviet rock band recording session in a 1980s studio, showcasing the era's music production atmosphere.

Photographer Andrei Usov came up with the name “AnTrop” and drew the logo in 1982, playing off of Tropillo’s last name (a bit he’d teased on the Blue Album with “Los Pills Records”).

Over the past ten years, the mark has changed a bit. It started out as a big T with “trop”/”trop” tucked beneath it. Later on, it morphed into a signature paired with an “ohm” symbol and the Latin tag “consummari in unum.”

Logos of Soviet rock band Akvarium, showcasing designs from different eras in St. Petersburg.

Red Wave and the Melodiya opening

From 1983 to 1986, his master’s fueled the Red Wave (which was released in the US), and along with the lobbying from Alla Pugacheva and poet Andrei Voznesensky, according to BG, helped Melodiya officially release Aquarium. Meanwhile, pirate copies of his tapes multiplied “in the millions,” he later claimed—”even on submarines.”

Shutdown, workaround, and mass vinyl

In 1986 the House of Pioneers studio was shuttered under KGB pressure:

“A new KGB curator told the director: ‘Shut this circus with Tropillo down.’ I’d just finished renovations, installed new gear, had a 16-track on the way… and they forced me to resign for a ‘truancy’ that didn’t happen.”

He moved operations to the Leningrad Rock Club. In a year, he found a way to use a special-order loophole. He put an ally in a repertory office and filed S90 “special orders” under institutional cover (“Recordings from the Leningrad Rock Club phono library”). This got state plants to press rock LPs legally. They often reused his masters. He created the AnTrop imprint alongside the Melodiya logo.

“I realized that if you file the special order correctly for approved repertoire, every Soviet record plant could press my albums in million runs… My first S90s were 500–1,000 copies—enough to get into Melodiya’s catalog. Once a plant saw an attractive catalog line, it ordered a matrix and sleeves and pressed away—paying no one: not me, not the musicians.”

Melodiya management

Exterior of iconic Soviet record store Melodiya, key to the history of Soviet rock music.

In 1988, he independently ran the VI Leningrad Rock Festival, and laserdisc concert films followed in 1990. He also licensed cassettes through Polton (Warsaw) and even put out some early CDs before Melodiya’s own CD plant. Then, on August 1, 1989, he became the director of Melodiya’s Leningrad branch. He had a lot of records from famous musicians that he could release quickly, and he did. But he didn’t always give the musicians much control over the covers of their records, and he charged fees that were typical of the time.

Church, label, and the 1990s. The second studio

He started the “Producer Center of Rock-and-Roll Parishes” connected to the Unified Evangelical Lutheran Church of Russia, and he used the church’s legal identity to order new pressings. The old church space was also used as a studio and a place to record music, and he even paid for a new cross for the building. When the rock boom cooled off in the early 1990s, Tropillo said that commercialization was hurting quality and that there was a lack of curatorship with all the new bands popping up. He shifted AnTrop’s focus to reissues of Western classic rock on vinyl, positioning it as a form of cultural education.

Around 1990, Tropillo shifted from doing hands-on engineering to focusing on label operations, scheduling, and expansion, as AnTrop and Melodiya were both operating at the same time. He empowered engineers and fellow travelers—Alexey Vishnya, Sergey Bogaev (Oblachny Kray), Yuri Morozov, and Yasin Tropillo, who is his nephew.

Building a plant in St. Petersburg. The third studio

Plaque of Leningrad Record Plant, USSR, linked to Soviet rock history. Soviet Union culture, Melodiya record label.

This was AnTrop’s third reincarnation. In 2001, Tropillo became a shareholder of LZG (36% combined stake: 25% plant + 11% studio). The ground floor had a CD production line he helped set up (he said he even pledged his apartment to finance it). The recording studio was on the third floor, with equipment gathered since 1975 and a team of four engineers. Piterfon (the building owner) and a Ukrainian equipment supplier were partners. The studio was funded by the plant’s revenue, which meant that, according to the charter, no rent was paid. This allowed Andrei to keep recording for free and upgrade equipment gradually. The facility deal was set to expire in 2015.

In the 2000s, a lot of artists used Tropillo’s new studio. Sessions were run by other engineers, while Yasin Tropillo managed operations. By 2006, the label’s catalog had over 300 releases. This was because of Andrei’s belief that anyone who wants to record should be recorded. He thought that even if most of them wouldn’t break through, it was important to give them a chance. As producer Oleg Kovriga said, Andrei didn’t charge, burned through cash quickly, and didn’t care about money. He trusted it would return—until it didn’t.

The break — ban, raid, and vanished tapes (2010–2011)

Back in November 2010, Andrei and his team got blacklisted and weren’t allowed into the studio anymore. It wasn’t until March 2011 that Yasin finally got in. He found that the missing interfaces, mixers, instruments, and—worst of all—the master tape library were gone. The library included 52 Russian-rock albums, 14 Aquarium albums, and 38-ips reels with the originals. They yanked the wiring, broke the monitors, and some of the gear was reportedly stolen. The rest was vandalized. Yasin remembered a local executive saying that the rest of the equipment would be buried instead of sent back.

Andrei later summarized the shareholder arc and loss:

“One of our founders gifted a single share to another… Three years later he had 89%. Then, in 2011, my studio doors were broken, equipment partly damaged, partly stolen, and the entire tape library disappeared. I valued the holdings—over 160 items—at €6.5 million. Everything’s in an unknown place; years in court brought nothing.”

Legal CD sales were dropping like a rock with the rise of the internet. Andrei said he was against the plan to start making pirate CDs, and he even asked for an inspection. But he said they took the pirate stampers and stock away before he could stop them. Some said Andrei knew about the whole operation, and that the recording studio’s legitimacy had been used as cover—like the gray-zone tactics from the 1990s. But in the end, things fell apart. Andrei was basically erased as a shareholder, documents were disputed, signatures were contested, and the police didn’t do anything. We tried everything to get them to help, like making appeals, having a support festival with musicians, and even writing petitions to the governor and president. But nothing worked.

After 2015

Elderly man with white beard, thoughtful pose. Evokes Soviet rock era nostalgia. Green foliage background, intense gaze.

Tropillo has been working as an artist since 2010. He moved to Finland and kept performing, sometimes singing with a reformed “New Zoopark” (people had mixed reactions due to his unique singing style). He translated and adapted Beatles songs into Russian for club shows and worked with a bunch of other people.

“We worked together in recent years,” Dmitry Shagin remembers. “We’d invite each other to perform together. The last one was big, electric, and powerful.”

In 2021, Otdelenie Vykhod (Kovriga) put out early Kino on LP/CD from the original Tropillo tapes, and the money they made went to pay down Andrei’s debts. In 2022, he recorded anti-war songs, working with singers like Marina Kapuro to bring sharp, topical material to life.

Recognition, royalties

For years, others have been reissuing his work without permission or paying royalties. There were some exceptions, though. Boris Grebenshchikov and Oleg Kovriga always recognized Tropillo’s role. As Yasin remembered:

“Of all the contracts Andrei ever signed, the only one that really worked was the oral agreement with Boris Grebenshchikov. He treated him as a full participant in the early recordings and sent him royalties whenever there were reprints—to the very end.”

Legacy and worldview

“When we started playing rock ‘n’ roll, we wanted to bring Western music to the USSR—to build a cultural bridge. We were quick and did it well. People started listening to and writing our music without the West, which by then had started to degrade. The good music of the 1970s was gone, and the youth weren’t hearing good music. So now we’ve got to start over. People in Russia need to listen to good music and build a new bridge between Western and Russian culture.”

Politically, he was openly anti-Soviet, loved Western culture, but was also determined to create a “Russian canon” of rock—to learn the craft and make it native. He really wanted to be recognized, and he was more interested in being a hands-on producer of talent than a console-bound engineer. He never lost the urge to put great music into people’s hands—even if that meant outsmarting systems.

On the “pirate” label, his answer never changed:

“It’s wrong to call me a pirate. I stole nothing. I pressed records until 1996, when Russia signed the Vienna Convention. I released music recorded before June 1972—absolutely in the public domain… I’ve practiced copyleft my whole life. Information must be free and equally accessible. Selling information is a crime against humanity. I fought that and will keep fighting it. The internet solved it; the very idea of piracy vanished—information became available to everyone.”

My friends were on the same page. As Kovriga said, AnTrop’s cheap LPs were more like a public education project than a business. To musicians like Mikhail Borzykhin, the covers and vinyl quality might’ve seemed laughable, but the fact that they were accessible mattered.

“We’d chuckle comparing covers to the originals—and the vinyl quality—sure. But there was joy that these records existed and anybody could buy them. People would get used to the culture; we’d build a shared cultural world.”

Key Facts

© Artur Netsvetaev