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Campus News Spotlight Issue - October 15, 2001 |
The many sounds of Manny
UNM’s sound recording engineer hears it all
By Mary Conrad
Really
this story should be a sound bite instead of a spotlight.
Because thats what Manny Rettinger is all about sound. The Music
Departments sound recording engineer, Manny has immersed himself in the
sounds of music since he was a teenager playing the electric guitar in a 60s
rock group. And he cant imagine his world any other way. Music is
my whole life, he says.
Mannys world in the UNM recording studio is dominated by a mixing board,
a video monitor, duplicating machines, and computers of various configurations.
Squeezed between technical components, Manny, student employee Liz Rincon, and
students, record and reproduce a CD of every faculty, student and staff recital,
giving a copy of each to the Fine Arts Library. A recording of the UNM orchestras
performance with Bernard Zinck plays in the background as he talks about his
work.
When Manny came to his job four years ago, he brought his equipment with him.
Since that time, the studio has earned enough money through fees, mastering
CDs and making outside recordings to buy its own equipment, most of which
is state-of-the-art, Manny says proudly.
We try to make it a real professional place. Like a professional studio.
Students dont goof off here. Its a creative job. If theres
downtime, theres always more to learn.
Since his days as a frustrated music student, the UNM music department has
changed its attitude toward electronic sound, says Manny. There may have
been some kicking and screaming, but the department now acknowledges the new
world, the new technologies, the new ways of making music.
Manny comes from a generation of self-taught sound engineers, most of whom
started as musicians. As technology came, we started getting little machines.
It was a way of making moneynext thing I knew, it was a studio.
In Mannys case, the studioand for a while, the labelwas called
UBIK Sound, after a Phillip Dick science fiction novel in which the characters
go into different dreamlike realities. A spray called UBIK enabled them to leave
each reality.
I guess I live in a Phillip Dick universe, with a lot of realities going
on at the same time, says Manny.
Interested in all sorts of music, Manny played for a time with a Zimbabwean
band, Thomas Mapfumo and The Blacks Unlimited, a group whose music
mirrors the struggles of Zimbabwe and Africa. Manny co-produced their most recent
CD, Chimurenga Explosion, winner of the 2001 Association for Independent
Music Indie Award for Best Contemporary World Music.
He has also mastered a collection of music, titled Bosavi: Rainforest
Music from Papua New Guinea, collected by Steve Feld, and produced by
Smithsonian-Folkways.
After 20 years in the field, Manny is about to realize a dream as he builds
a new studio attached to the Outpost Performing Space. Opportunities there,
including recording bands and voice-overs, complement Mannys work at UNM.
Leaving the studio, Manny runs his hand over his sets of windchimes. An imagined
breeze tickles the studios still air.
Its all sound, he says.
| The
University of New Mexico Albuquerque, New Mexico USA Copyright ©1998 The University of New Mexico. Comments to: paaffair@unm.edu |
Campus News Public Affairs Department Hodgin Hall, 2nd floor Albuquerque, NM 87131-0011 Telephone: (505) 277-5813, Fax: (505) 277-1981 |