AnTrop

In 1976, Andrei Tropillo first attempted to set up a small record factory in a room rented from the Geophysics department of Leningrad State University. He eventually replaced his plans for setting up a record factory with plans to build a recording studio. Throughout the late 1970s, Tropillo managed bands and staged concerts, using the money earned from organizing concerts to buy technical equipment for sound recording.[2]

Tropillo took a part-time job supervising a sound recording program and giving guitar lessons at the Second House of Pupils and Pioneers in Okhta in order to gain access to the institution's studio facilities. Under the auspices of the House of Pioneers, he was also able to acquire discarded hardware from other institutions in order to equip the studio. When the pupils left for the evening and summer holidays, Tropillo invited local rock musicians to record in the studio. Akvarium and Mify were the first groups to be recorded in Tropillo's studio.[2]

From 1980 to 1981, a studio collective started to form at AnTrop, consisting of musicians who were interested in recording work and able to step in at short notice when band members didn't show up. While most bands at the time had stable line-ups for concerts, musicians moved freely between bands in the recording studio. Sergey Kuryokhin was one of the musicians who regularly came to the AnTrop studios and contributed to recordings.[2]

In 1987, Tropillo was hired by the Leningrad branch of the state record label Melodiya.[2] AnTrop became an official label, and Tropillo, taking advantage of the copyright laws of that time, released classic albums of Western rock bands such as The Beatles and Led Zeppelin. On the records themselves, there was a note that it was a "broadcast recording" (from the radio), which, according to the law of that time, eliminated the observance of copyright in commercial use.[3] On the records of The Beatles, for example, it was generally stated that the record was "taken from the collection of Nikolai Vasin" (a famous Soviet/Russian Beatle fan).

All sorts of liberties were allowed in the design, the covers were often distorted - the names were written in Cyrillic or even translated into Russian, sometimes even photographs of people were replaced or substituted. For example, on the cover of the record Led Zeppelin IV, the artist Dmitry Shagin (Mitki) is depicted,[4] and on the cover of the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Heart Club Band the faces of Tropillo himself and Nikolai Vasin appeared in the back row[5] and on the cover of Abbey Road, Lennon was depicted barefoot instead of McCartney.[6]

In 1987–1988, Tropillo released several albums and mini-albums containing material from the full albums via the Melodiya label.

The envelopes of the records read: "Sound engineer: A. Tropillo, recorded at the studio of the Leningrad City Rock Club", and the AnTrop logo appeared on the front side of most covers next to the Melodiya logo - obviously this is the first appearance of the AnTrop label on vinyl records.

These were some of the first albums of Leningrad rock released on vinyl and thus became available to a much wider audience than before, when rock albums were replicated almost exclusively by rewriting from tape recorder to tape recorder. The significance of this peculiar mini-anthology of Leningrad rock music of the mid-1980s is comparable to the significance of the Archive of Popular Music series, which for the first time presented on Soviet vinyl a high-quality selection of foreign rock music of the 1960-1970s.

In 1993–1994, Tropillo released records under the name Santa Records.[7]

In 2011, the AnTrop production center was threatened with eviction from its premises on the territory of the former Leningrad Record Plant. On 2 May 2011, the "AnTrop-Help!" charity concert was held at the Sergey Kuryokhin Contemporary Art Center in St. Petersburg. Boris Grebenshchikov, Andrei Makarevich, Oleg Garkusha, and Padla Bear Outfit were among the musicians who performed to support Tropillo.[8][9]

• AnTrop on Discogs