On ‘100 Sound Effects,’ Fred Armisen resurrects the long-dead haunted mansion album

Fred Armisen loves doing interviews. It’s a rare trait for someone of Armisen’s stature in Hollywood: an A-list comedy giant who spent more than a decade on “Saturday Night Live,” skewered hipster culture for eight seasons on IFC’s sketch staple “Portlandia” and who currently stars as the lovably deranged Uncle Fester on Netflix’s Addams Family revival, “Wednesday.”

And yet Armisen is completely sincere when he insists he’s delighted to be in press mode for his new album, “100 Sound Effects.” “I love it,” Armisen promises as our Zoom conversation goes over the hour mark and I apologize for keeping 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 about the creation of “100 Sound Effects,” a literal catalog of highly specific noises that could occur across a variety of settings, such as music venues and stores (“Music Venue Employee Kicking Everyone Out While Throwing Away Bottles”), airplanes (“Overhead Compartment Closing”) and haunted houses (“Haunted House Demonic Voices”), the latter of which was top of mind as he conceptualized the project.

“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 move the idea along, Armisen went to pick the brain of his longtime Chicago friend, prolific recording engineer Steve Albini, who founded the recording studio Electrical Audio in 1995 and famously recorded Nirvana’s “In Utero,” among hundreds of other era-defining rock albums. (Albini died of a heart attack in 2024 at the age of 61.) Albini connected Armisen with Dave Grohl, whom he thought might be able to point Armisen in the direction of an L.A.-based producer who wouldn’t mind working on “100 Sound Effects” in piecemeal fashion — two weeks here, two weeks there — whenever Armisen got a break in his schedule. That’s how Armisen started working with producer Darrell Thorp (Foo Fighters, Beck, Radiohead), who the comedian describes as laser-focused on the job at hand, despite 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.”

Armisen also pulled together a team of friends and collaborators, including his wife (and fellow comedian-actor), Riki Lindhome, Tim Heidecker, Bill Hader, Mary Lynn Rajskub, Amber Coffman and Alice Carbone Tench. Lindhome assisted in capturing sounds while on vacation (“Outdoor Event Walking On Pebbles”) and in hotels. Track 80, “Room Service Ooh,” is exactly what it sounds like, with a clattering lid being lifted off a plate followed by Lindhome’s exclamation at what’s underneath. Meanwhile, Heidecker, who has worked with Armisen on a few past projects, like the 2020 Showtime comedy “Moonbase 8,” helped with the camping sound effects, which, for the record, took place in Armisen’s backyard. (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 anyone who has followed Armisen’s unconventional road to comedy, “100 Sound Effects” almost comes across like a Venn diagram of his varied interests. He’s certainly no stranger to a recording studio; long before Armisen moved to Los Angeles in the late 1990s to pursue a career in TV and comedy, Armisen spent his early life in and around punk-rock scenes. Growing up in Long Island, he was obsessed with the drums and sat behind the kit in high school bands, and in the late ’80s, he moved to Chicago to drum in the punk outfit Trenchmouth. When the group broke up around 1996, Armisen took on gigs as a background drummer for the Blue Man Group and even formed a salsa band.

As Armisen’s comedy career eventually eclipsed his music background, he still found ways to weave the latter part into his projects and sketches; one of his better-known SNL characters was Ian Rubbish, an ’80s British punk with a predilection for singing flattering songs about Margaret (a.k.a. “Maggie”) Thatcher. In 2018, Armisen released a Netflix special called “Standup for Drummers,” which was also released as a record and won the comedy album Grammy the following year.

Though “100 Sound Effects” might not appear like it has much in common with “Standup for Drummers,” the throughline is Armisen’s observational humor, which are communicated across a handful of winking (but true-to-life) scenarios. For example, in a series of sound effects set within a music venue, there is 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 is a comedic element within “100 Sound Effects” — but he also hopes filmmakers will find the collection genuinely useful, especially since his effects are intended to be hyperrealistic when the majority of available effects tend 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 special “Standup for Drummers.”

(David Moir)

Even as Armisen moves past the album-release stage and into promoting far less niche projects, he says he’ll always be thinking of Albini, to whom “100 Sound Effects” is dedicated. Armisen says he most admired Albini’s (at times infamous) directness and commitment to making clients’ work sound the best it could.

“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 figuring out the power of the word ‘no.’ That really helped me. If I was too afraid to say no about a scene or a project, I would think, ‘OK, what would I do if I was Steve Albini?’ And all of a sudden, 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.”