Librarian Chris Mangione brings almost 25 years of film-score obssessiveness to 2 Pop Music. Growing up in Buffalo, NY, he saw “The Untouchables” in a theater and was completely blown away by the music. “The main title grabbed me like no other piece of music has in my life, before or since!” Immediately going out and buying the soundtrack the next day, Chris began compiling a spiral notebook with every composer’s credits hand written on each page. “Pre-internet! I was doing it all by hand, using film history books and going to the college library to look at microfilm archives of the Los Angeles and New York Times entertainment sections, all the while buying up more and more soundtrack albums through the 1990’s.”
Moving to Los Angeles in 1994 with a degree in Graphic Design in hand, Chris met various composers and slowly began to climb the ladder of the film music industry. He worked odd jobs as a Composer’s Assistant, Junior Agent, Music Supervisor, finally settling on music editorial. “I just wanted to figure out the position where I could exact the right amount of influence, maybe helping to sway a filmmaker to hire a particular composer. Perhaps it was naïve, but music editorial seemed like the place to be.”
Once Chris established himself as a Music Editor Librarian, he was then able to parlay that into a side-business of soundtrack album production and album assemblies.
He has produced several soundtrack albums, and has worked for Percepto Records, La La Land Records, and BuySoundtrax producing score albums. “As a music editor, I love having everything split apart, but the album assembly is just as entertaining; it’s like reverse engineering. You need to whittle down 90 minutes of underscore into a cohesive 45-50 minute play. What goes and what stays, what gets edited down? Fun times!” After fourteen years of being a music editorial librarian and amassing a collection of thousands of soundtrack albums, Chris is constantly looking ahead while embracing the past. “A good librarian isn’t just well-versed in film scores. It’s actually too narrow of a focus in this day and age. Filmmakers are constantly looking for unconventional and nontraditional methods to find the musical identity of their films, and we hope to be able to help them achieve their vision.”