AN-2

An-2 is Andrei Zakharov. He was born at the year of Moscow Olympic Games in the small Soviet industrial town of Izhevsk - one of many small towns like this in USSR mainly known for it's military manufacturing. But under some strange circumstances Izhevsk is renowned as the place of abnormal musical activity and often called the Russia’s home of electronic music. The situation was like this yet before the spreading of easy-to-get computer-based musical technologies and remain the same at present days. Izhevsk environs are also known as P.I.Tchaikovsky's place of birth. Andrei grew up listening to his parents’ disco tapes, but he could never think of being involved into electronic music. At the age of 9 he was sent to a music school to take piano lessons, but disliking its academic programme, he was turned out of it a year later (there were also 4 months of classic guitar which finished in the same manner – Andrei didn’t want to be an educated musician under any circumstances). Several years later, after the collapse of USSR, studying at school, Andrei started to collect various electronic music and during his last school years was engaged in organizing disco parties in his school. In 1996 Andrei started his own experiments with music using sample-based programs for DOS that just started to appear. After finishing the school and entering the university in 97 he began to build up his vinyl collection and play as a DJ in local clubs. By the next year Andrei had some of his first tracks finished, one of them was included into electronic music compilation released in Moscow - it was the first release of project An-2. By the year 2000 An-2 released the debut CD album in Russia which was sold out in 2 weeks and then many times re-released on Russian black market. While studying at the university, Andrei found and bought few decent old analog machines, little by little collected the small studio, and having better sounding tracks, started to communicate with european labels. One of these labels was WasNotWas - Andrei accidentally met its owner during his trip to Germany in 2002, and they immediately signed all tracks from the promo CD Andrei had with him. After graduating from the university in 2003 (picking up a degree in World Economics along the way), Andrei decided to undertake the move to the Northern Capital of Russia, St.Petersburg. Living in St.Petersburg Andrei left the club life and concentrated on studio work continuing to release his tracks and remixes in Europe. The year 2004 was celebrated with founding the own label - 'THEOMATIC' to release the music of An-2, Amberflame (another of Andrei's aliases) and any other with familiar vibes. Read more on Last.fm. User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License; additional terms may apply.