Fred Armisen: Miking Up the Living World

It’s hot as hell in Los Angeles today, and the clatter of Fred62 is deafening. A bad environment for an interview, I reckon, as I fiddle with my wireless microphones, exchange hellos with the waitress who’s always on her shift when I’m eating here, and wait for Fred Armisen to join me. He’s in-between press runs for the new, two-part second season of Wednesday, which dwarfs the buzz around his new, aptly-titled album of haunted house noises, plane behavior, and basketball dribbling, 100 Sound Effects, and is back home in our neighborhood for a few days to catch his breath. In execution, Netflix monoculture supersedes a 39-minute curation of man-made everyday sounds by a Saturday Night Live alumnus. But, in a proper and perfect world, the noise of European washing machines, glasses breaking, and guys opening overhead airplane compartments trumps an Uncle Fester dress-up. Maybe I just have wishful thinking. But seriously: 100 Sound Effects is a fun, detouring curio adrift in the crests of critical acclaim being heaped onto its release-day neighbors, Geese’s Getting Killed and Cate Le Bon’s Michelangelo Dying.

Fred arrives and a guy leaning against the front window places his face but doesn’t say anything. After looking at Fred62’s wall of portraits and not finding Fred Armisen’s face, he just ogles at the both of us while the steam from his plate of onion rings dampens his grin. Fred is a kind lunch date, ordering a veggie burger and fries but not touching either until they’re cold, because he’s too busy answering any question you throw his way. He’s not afraid to go inside-baseball on SNL sketches or his days playing drums in the Chicago punk band Trenchmouth. He learned to play drums because, at fourteen, he saw Devo play Radio City Music Hall.

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We’re at this diner for two hours and spend half of it talking, at length, about how Lindsey Buckingham’s genius is sorely undervalued in the rock music pantheon. “We keep trying him into the drama of Fleetwood Mac,” he says. “But, as a musician, he deserves something. We should invent an award, me and you, and present it to him.” Fred admits that he rewatches the Weezer sketch with Matt Damon all the time and gushes about the costume department’s decision to put a grunge flannel on Leslie Jones. He reveals that, after Margaret Thatcher’s death, it was Seth Meyers’ idea for Fred to play the only punk in England who loved the Iron Lady, not his. Oh, and he’d already met Steve Jones prior to that sketch, at a Whole Foods. At one point, we’re defending the greatness of Paul McCartney’s “Wonderful Christmastime” to each other, to which Fred confirms “there’s something about the rhythm of it that I find really enticing and mysterious.”

Drag City pressed some 7-inch vinyl of Crisis of Comformity’s “Fist Fight!” in 2011, though maybe you know it better as the song from the “Punk Band Reunion At the Wedding” SNL sketch. Four years later, the Chicago label released a 12-inch of Blue Jean Committee’s Catalina Breeze, featuring Armisen and Hader. Drag City, whose catalogue features everything from David Berman’s entire career to John Mulaney’s standup material, is one of the last truly cool, pre-Y2K record labels still in business. Still, how do you even pitch a record like 100 Sound Effects? “They’re in my corner,” Fred says. “They would let me know if the record was undoable. But they put out books, and they have an art gallery. As long as my explanation to them is succinct and I get it right, then they’re on board.” The hard part, he notes, is actually completing the project he’s assigned himself.

After the waitress brings us our drinks, Fred makes an important clarification: There are 101 sound effects on 100 Sound Effects, not 100. You can thank Steve Martin for that. “I thought, ‘Well, maybe it should be a number, so that people understand there are a lot of them,” he says. “Something about 100 sounded nice. I was like, ‘Well, this sounds like a nice thing.’ I was telling Steve about it, and he said, ‘You should make it 101. It’ll be pretty funny that the numbers don’t match.’ I was like, ‘I’ll take that idea!’” And it was Bill Hader’s idea to begin the whole thing with the sound of a needle dropping onto a vinyl record. “It’s listed in the liner notes as ‘inspiration from Bill Hader,’” I say. “That’s his only contribution?” “Yeah,” Fred responds, “but it’s a good contribution.”

Hader isn’t the only colleague of Fred’s helping out on 100 Sound Effects. His wife, Riki Lindhome, is there, as are comedian Mary Lynn Rajskub, ex-Dirty Projectors vocalist Amber Coffman, author Alice Carbone Tench, and Ant-Man and the Wasp star Tim Heidecker. Some of them were all last-minute, “Who’s in LA right now?” call-ups, Fred says, but he and Lindhome recorded a lot of their tracks together while traveling for weddings, including “Outdoor Event Talking on Pebbles” and its successor, “Outdoor Event Walking on Pebbles and Recognition.” Heidecker, whom Fred calls his “comedy soulmate,” understood the album concept immediately: “When I explained the album to him, he got it right away and he explained it better than me. I was trying to tell him about this record, and his answer was, ‘Oh, like a library record?’” Heidecker’s tracks on the album, which often span longer than a minute, are closer to field recordings than sound effects, and they were captured on a “camping trip” in Dave Grohl’s Studio 606 in Northridge. He and Fred would “pack up” their supplies on a plastic table, or mic up an engineer zipping his equipment into a bag.

Hearing these tracks, I think of sound designers hired by production companies to add effects into cartoons—the folks who recreate human music with practical objects, like whisking a playing card on a shirt-covered snare drum to mimic slicing bread. I also think about Cassandra Jenkins’ use of binaural recordings on her recent albums. And knowing the precision that even the most casual recordings require, it’s clear that the parts of 100 Sound Effects that most listeners would consider simple were anything but. Talking to Fred, I learn that he edited a “damn it” reaction out of “Guitar Tunes but Still Somehow Out of Tune.” And, for the right kind of sky noise on the “outdoor tracks,” he rigged up a portable recorder in his backyard and hooked snippets of bird, wind, and tree ambience. But, after too many takes got ruined by beeping car horns or scattering sirens, he opted to move the operation into the studio permanently. “I thought I knew how sound worked better,” he admits. “But it wasn’t until I did this that I realized how difficult it is to get it isolated.”

DIGGING THROUGH 100 SOUND EFFECTS reminds me of my first encounter with Disneyland Records’ Chilling, Thrilling Sounds of the Haunted House, or when I bought a vinyl of whale sounds for a dollar a few years ago. They just don’t make novelty albums like that now. But, if anyone was ever going to do it, it was always going to be Fred Armisen—a left-of-center comedian who never thinks of anything he does as left-of-center. Instead, his goal is, always, “let me try to finish this one fun thing.” With something like, say, his Standup For Drummers special from seven years ago, the hope was there’d be enough people who’d identify with that niche. “And then, when I’ve done standup on the road for musicians,” Fred adds, “people turn out for it even if they’re not musicians, and they seem to get it.”

After its announcement, someone said of 100 Sound Effects: “I love when creative people get bored.” But for Fred, making the album wasn’t a product of boredom. It was a nagging feeling that something was missing. “I was like, ‘Whatever happened to that, those old sound-effects records you can get at a record store? Why aren’t there new ones?’” he remembers. “And then I think, well, if I just try it a little… And then it becomes a real project from there. It was the same thing for Standup For Drummers, like, ‘What if, just once, I go out and do standup comedy for one teeny little group and I make those jokes?’ It’s always: ‘What if?’” That “What if?” turned into a record that’s not just one step further into Fred’s outlandishness, but pretty good material to promote on talk shows.

Fred has this bit I can’t get enough of, where he’s ramping up to do Phil Collins’ drum fill in “In the Air Tonight” but, when it happens, he plays a Ringo Starr fill instead. The laughter that clogs the room in that moment, he says, is one of the best responses any of his bits have ever received. “It’s because it’s such a popular song,” he figures. “You see it in commercials, everyone knows it. And there’s enough of a build-up that people can have a reaction. I’ve done that in larger venues and, even as I’m drumming, I can feel and hear the reaction. And what’s great is it’s quick. It’s over before you know it. It doesn’t just become a performance-art piece.” Some of the tracks on 100 Sound Effects resist that performance-art identity, too, if only because they’re so oddly specific that Fred had to have experienced them firsthand, like “Sparsely Attended Show Encore with Someone Shouting ‘Where’s Jim?’” or “Walking into a Video Room at an Art Museum and Walking Out Quickly.”

Like Heidecker, the late Steve Albini was another friend of Fred’s who immediately got the point of 100 Sound Effects. He wanted to record the tracks at Albini’s studio, Electrical Audio, but decided that, because of his self-imposed, open-ended deadline, he needed to do it close to Los Feliz. Albini later put Fred in contact with the album’s engineer, Darrell Thorp. “I said, ‘I’m doing the sound effects record. Do you know of anyone in LA—someplace I could drive to and come home?’ And he was so into it that he got in touch with Dave Grohl, and Dave Grohl said, ‘Yes, I do know the right guy.’ He made the phone call that I didn’t make, to Darrell.” Albini passed away before 100 Sound Effects was completed, in May 2024. Fred was in Ireland when he got the news, and he finished the record with Albini in mind, honoring him as a parting gift. “It wasn’t like, ‘This album is dedicated to Steve, because he’s my friend.’ He made it happen. He facilitated it,” Fred affirms. “Him being a cheerleader for it… It might have gotten a slower start had he said, ‘What are you talking about?’ But he said, ‘This is a great idea.’ That made me want to do this.”

Fred recalls Albini’s humor while describing music, but his comedy was a bit more heretical than Fred’s. “His ability to put things into words, as to what works and what doesn’t work for him, is a real strength,” he remembers, in the present tense, because Albini’s light abounds. “To say, ‘I don’t want to do it this way, because I want to serve the band that’s coming in,’ it’s very amazing. It takes a sense of humor to be able to put that into words. And it’s his personality that helps him help bands. He really was of service. He was like, ‘I’m here to make you sound the way you want to sound.’” Fred tells me that Albini, never a man of convenience, appreciated what a microphone was and how they work. You can hear that character in every nook of 100 Sound Effects. Fred also reveals that Albini was not only a big flag guy, but that he would critique them. “Do you remember any that he didn’t like?” I ask. “Hell yeah,” he says. “The Swiss flag. It’s everywhere. It’s simple. But he thought it was low-effort.”

A lot of 100 Sound Effects is plain merry, but Fred hopes some of it gets utilized in actual productions one day, like the glass breaking clips or, more specifically, “Small Theater Microphone Isn’t Working.” “You don’t hear the performer trying to talk,” he explains. “It would be nice if they shoot a scene where someone is on stage trying to do standup somewhere. And then the sound effect is everyone going, ‘Your mic is off. You don’t need the mic. Mic’s not working! Put the mic down!’ That would be ideal.” The glass breaking tracks took multiple takes, Fred says. He went to a place in the Valley, where you can pay to smash glasses and “get your rage out,” and set his recorder up in the room. “There were times where I could hear the fan, the air conditioning. So, I had to really get the mic in there and break the glass. I wanted it to sound like glass, because, sometimes, it just sounds like a rock breaking. It had to have that high-pitched tone.” There’s also “Glass Falls but Doesn’t Break,” which “took a while to capture but was worth it.”

Decades ago, Fred made the transition from punk drummer to standup comic. He doles out the friends who were there for the early bits: Nick Swardson, Zach Galifianakis, Bob Odenkirk. It’d feel name-droppy if it wasn’t all so obviously sincere. I ask him, though, who it was that helped him really go all-in and, without hesitation, he says: Chris Wink, Matt Goldman, and Phil Stanton—the founders of the Blue Man Group, with whom he played drums in the nineties. “They mixed comedy and music in their shows all of the time,” he says. “They would go to every city, and they’d go on The Tonight Show, and they’d play music. And they were funny. By example, they were like, ‘There’s a way in.’”

And that “way in” has paid off ten-fold for Fred. His resumé spans hit sketch shows on different networks, a stint as the mouthpiece for Seth Meyers’ Late Night house band, the 8G Band, a Grammy nomination, multiple Peabody Awards, and regular clips of him doing music-centric bits on national television, like his “Punk Music Impressions” on Fallon three years ago. In the TikTok comment section of a clip from Fred’s recent appearance on Colbert, someone wrote about 100 Sound Effects: “Bill Hader’s gonna love this album.” Bingo. “This seems like an album that Mulaney would eat up, too,” I say to Fred. “John and Bill are my close friends, and we always want to entertain each other,” he says back. “This record is very much for them. I have them in mind.” Having this ecosystem of people he’s always trying to impress and get a laugh of is “what I want from life,” Fred admits, in-between bites of shoestring fries before a busboy clears the table. “I’ll look at pictures of George Harrison and Monty Python and I see pictures of my heroes hanging out with each other. That’s what I’ve always wanted. Of course I want to entertain everybody, but, for Carrie Brownstein, or Steve Albini, or J Mascis, we’re always making stuff for each other. It’s the ultimate thing.”

Fred and I eventually unstick ourselves from our leather booth and spill back into the afternoon busyness of Vermont Avenue, where the hot is somehow hotter and the cars are galloping by. Passing by a mural of Cate Blanchett in the movie Tár, we say our goodbyes and I locate my car. I realize there is one question I hadn’t asked him, about whether or not making 100 Side Effects was a good exercise in better understanding the musicality of the living world. I look back for Fred but he’s plum gone, swept up by a back-alley parking lot. Turning back around, I notice that someone’s scraped the front bumper of my car and, at the first sight of black paint streaks on the dented white exterior, let out a cartoonish “Hmmph.” I pitch myself into the driver’s seat, shut the door on my tote bag, sigh a beaten sigh, try again successfully, push the ignition, and get my answer.

Matt Mitchell is Paste’s music editor, reporting from their home in Los Angeles.

Fred Armisen: Miking Up the Living World

We took the actor, comedian, and musician out to lunch and talked with him about Steve Albini, recording broken glass, trying to impress his friends, and his brand new album, 100 Sound Effects.