Fred Armisen loves doing interviews. It’s a uncommon trait for somebody of Armisen’s stature in Hollywood: an A-list comedy large who spent greater than a decade on “Saturday Night Live,” skewered hipster tradition for eight seasons on IFC’s sketch staple “Portlandia” and who at the moment stars because the lovably deranged Uncle Fester on Netflix’s Addams Household revival, “Wednesday.”
And but Armisen is totally honest when he insists he’s delighted to be in press mode for his new album, “100 Sound Effects.” “I love it,” Armisen guarantees as our Zoom dialog goes over the hour mark and I apologize for retaining him. “When I was growing up — [and] I think about this all the time — if a David Byrne interview or a Mark Mothersbaugh interview came on the radio or whatever, I really consumed every word of it,” Armisen says. “It was as important as whatever they were promoting. I already had the album, but I wanted to hear what went into this record.”
Armisen is equally forthcoming concerning the creation of “100 Sound Effects,” a literal catalog of extremely particular noises that might happen throughout a wide range of settings, similar to music venues and shops (“Music Venue Employee Kicking Everyone Out While Throwing Away Bottles”), airplanes (“Overhead Compartment Closing”) and haunted homes (“Haunted House Demonic Voices”), the latter of which was prime of thoughts as he conceptualized the mission.
“It was a feeling of something that was missing,” Armisen says. “I just remember sound effects — or specifically haunted mansion albums were just around. It was a little bit of a nagging whim. Like, ‘Huh, whatever happened to those? Where do the new ones live? Where do people get sound effects now?’ I’m sure there is a place, but it didn’t feel like there was a hard-copy version. I’m sure there are sound libraries you could go to online, but I was like, ‘Where’s the actual album?’ It just kept popping up in my head. Like, ‘Man, I wonder what it’s like to record those? Maybe I’ll do one.’”
To maneuver the thought alongside, Armisen went to choose the mind of his longtime Chicago pal, prolific recording engineer Steve Albini, who based the recording studio Electrical Audio in 1995 and famously recorded Nirvana’s “In Utero,” amongst a whole lot of different era-defining rock albums. (Albini died of a coronary heart assault in 2024 on the age of 61.) Albini related Armisen with Dave Grohl, whom he thought would possibly be capable of level Armisen within the route of an L.A.-based producer who wouldn’t thoughts engaged on “100 Sound Effects” in piecemeal trend — two weeks right here, two weeks there — at any time when Armisen obtained a break in his schedule. That’s how Armisen began working with producer Darrell Thorp (Foo Fighters, Beck, Radiohead), who the comic describes as laser-focused on the job at hand, regardless of his rock ’n’ roll pedigree. “He’s worked with Paul McCartney and Dave Grohl and all the greats, and never was he like, ‘I’ve got some rock ’n’ roll stories for you,’” Armisen says. “He’s all about, ‘How can we make this sound really authentic?’ … As much as this word gets used — ‘professional’ — Darrell is a real producer and recording engineer. He really is there for the job.”
Fred Armisen and Riki Lindhome
(Ali Gradischer / Getty Photographs)
Armisen additionally pulled collectively a group of mates and collaborators, together with his spouse (and fellow comedian-actor), Riki Lindhome, Tim Heidecker, Invoice Hader, Mary Lynn Rajskub, Amber Coffman and Alice Carbone Tench. Lindhome assisted in capturing sounds whereas on trip (“Outdoor Event Walking On Pebbles”) and in motels. Observe 80, “Room Service Ooh,” is precisely what it seems like, with a clattering lid being lifted off a plate adopted by Lindhome’s exclamation at what’s beneath. In the meantime, Heidecker, who has labored with Armisen on just a few previous initiatives, just like the 2020 Showtime comedy “Moonbase 8,” helped with the tenting sound results, which, for the file, came about in Armisen’s yard. (Armisen is ardently anti-camping.) “Someday we’ll do an album together of just me and [Heidecker] talking,” Armisen says. “He really is the funniest person I’ve ever met.”
For anybody who has adopted Armisen’s unconventional street to comedy, “100 Sound Effects” virtually comes throughout like a Venn diagram of his various pursuits. He’s definitely no stranger to a recording studio; lengthy earlier than Armisen moved to Los Angeles within the late Nineteen Nineties to pursue a profession in TV and comedy, Armisen spent his adolescence in and round punk-rock scenes. Rising up in Lengthy Island, he was obsessive about the drums and sat behind the equipment in highschool bands, and within the late ’80s, he moved to Chicago to drum within the punk outfit Trenchmouth. When the group broke up round 1996, Armisen took on gigs as a background drummer for the Blue Man Group and even fashioned a salsa band.
As Armisen’s comedy profession finally eclipsed his music background, he nonetheless discovered methods to weave the latter half into his initiatives and sketches; one in every of his better-known SNL characters was Ian Garbage, an ’80s British punk with a predilection for singing flattering songs about Margaret (a.okay.a. “Maggie”) Thatcher. In 2018, Armisen launched a Netflix particular referred to as “Standup for Drummers,” which was additionally launched as a file and gained the comedy album Grammy the next 12 months.
Although “100 Sound Effects” won’t seem prefer it has a lot in frequent with “Standup for Drummers,” the throughline is Armisen’s observational humor, that are communicated throughout a handful of winking (however true-to-life) eventualities. For instance, in a sequence of sound results set inside a music venue, there’s a “Guitar Tuned but Still Somehow Out of Tune” and a “Sparsely Attended Show Encore With Someone Shouting ‘Where’s Jim?’”
Armisen acknowledges that there’s a comedic aspect inside “100 Sound Effects” — however he additionally hopes filmmakers will discover the gathering genuinely helpful, particularly since his results are supposed to be hyperrealistic when the vast majority of obtainable results are likely to sound staged. “There’s a tone to applause in movies and TV that I don’t think exists in real life,” Armisen says. “You can actually feel a director going, ‘Action!,’ especially in scenes with a band playing, and the crowd is going too crazy. In my concertgoing experience, I don’t think people go crazy in that way. It sounds like someone going, ‘Come on, you really love this band!’ And it never feels real.”
Fred Armisen in his Netflix particular “Standup for Drummers.”
(David Moir)
Whilst Armisen strikes previous the album-release stage and into selling far much less area of interest initiatives, he says he’ll all the time be considering of Albini, to whom “100 Sound Effects” is devoted. Armisen says he most admired Albini’s (at instances notorious) directness and dedication to creating purchasers’ work sound one of the best it might.
“As I would be going into working on a TV show or whatever, I sometimes think, ‘What would Steve Albini do in this situation?’” Armisen says. And most of it is determining the facility of the phrase ‘no.’ That actually helped me. If I used to be too afraid to say no a couple of scene or a mission, I’d suppose, ‘OK, what would I do if I was Steve Albini?’ And swiftly, I had a voice.”
Armisen continues: “But the real soul of our friendship is how much Steve made me laugh … He knew his job. He was like, ‘My only role is to make you sound the best you can.’ And I try to approach work that way. Even on SNL, I was like, ‘This is for Lorne [Michaels]. How can I be a soldier to this show? How can I deliver? [It’s] the same thing with working on ‘Wednesday’ — how can I do my best for what they’re asking me to do?’
“But I miss Steve all the time. And as has been explained to me, he’s still a part of me. Whenever I do stuff, he’s still alive.”
