Andrey Tropillo

Andrey Vladimirovich Tropillo (21 March 1951 – 28 April 2024) was a Leningrad sound engineer and producer. From 1979 he ran a sound-recording circle at the House of Young Technicians (the Pioneers' House on Panfilov Street, now the “Okhta” centre), from which the AnTrop studio grew.

His link with Oblachny Kray begins in January 1982, when he toured Arkhangelsk as sound engineer of Aquarium, and the musicians were struck by the quality of the band's first album. In 1984 Sergey Bogaev found Tropillo's phone number and was told: “Gather your lads and come.” Tropillo's studio recorded «Ublyuzhya Dolya» (1984) and «Stremya i Lyudi» (summer 1985, at night, alongside Konstantin Kinchev's album «Energiya»). On «Stremya i Lyudi» he was both engineer and backing vocalist in one song.

In 1990, as director of the Leningrad branch of Melodiya, Tropillo helped the band release «Svobody Zakhoteli?» on vinyl. Bogaev later worked as a staff engineer at AnTrop. In an obituary of Bogaev Tropillo called «Ygyatta» the album with “the most powerful hard-rock sound in the whole history of Russian sound recording”. Tropillo himself died in Finland.

According to Tropillo, after a concert in Arkhangelsk Bogaev came up to him with his albums; the others would not listen, but Tropillo decided: «there is no such band, not even a similar one, so it must be taken care of». He helped the band, brought part of his equipment to Arkhangelsk and built a studio there. He fitted out his own studio «AnTrop» in the House of Pioneers and Schoolchildren No. 2 on Panfilov Street (now the «Okhta» centre); he explained the name by his surname and by Atropos, the goddess of fate. «Stremya i Lyudi» (summer 1985) was made at night, in parallel with Kinchev's «Energiya»: the «barking» effects and the growling, he said, were his. From 2004 Bogaev worked at his studio in the former Melodiya plant.

In the Arkhangelsk TV report «10 Years of OK» (1992) Tropillo said he considered the band «at least among the ten best bands of the Soviet Union» — otherwise he would never have worked with it; he had been working with it since 1981 and they had recorded three albums together at his studio. He met the band when he travelled with Aquarium by invitation as manager and sound engineer: in the flat where they stayed there was a tape of Oblachny Kray, after which he «fell in love» with the band and has looked after its fate ever since.

Photo: Aleksei Vishnya, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 3.0.