Fred Armisen’s ‘100 Sound Effects’: Every Track Ranked

This one belongs where most bonus tracks belong. At the end.

Welcome to Armesinia! The album’s first track is just seven seconds, and those expecting the kind of the scratchy, old timey needle drops heard on Fatboy Slim‘s “Praise You” or Primitive Radio Gods‘ “Standing Outside a Broken Phone Booth with Money in My Hand,” will have their first WTF moment. Best guess: Armisen lowered a high-end tonearm and cartridge on pristine vinyl then lifted it, or he dropped an actual needle on a record and it toppled off. Two clicks and it’s over.

These tracks will leave you humming Bachman-Turner Overdrive’s “Takin’ Care of Business” while flickering the living room lights. Both are all about switch-flipping. The first, in a theater’s control booth while producers banter about a “cable trough,” where electric cords can be “nice and tucked away and clean.”

The second evokes a vibe of domestic incompetence, as a newly minted homeowner presumably learns by trial and error which breaker controls the electricity to which part of the house, and, odds are, leaves their partner stumbling around blindly in a pitch-black basement.

Low stakes on a plane: common sounds heard in flight, elevated on Track 52 by Lindhome saying, “I just need my charger,” and on Track 55 by some thrilling empty snack package-crinkling.

Four of the five tracks from what could be called Armisen’s Car Door Karaoke. Production values are crisp, but these could be bonus alternate takes of Track 15, “Car Door Closing Car Rental,” before the humor was added. Armisen told Rolling Stone the 1958 Ford version came about when he was driving around, saw someone pull into a driveway with said car, and told them, “Hi, I record car doors.” A labor of love, but apparently it was not a good year for car-door closings.

An oblique homage to the late Jim Carroll, he of The Basketball Diaries and “People Who Died” fame? The progression from Track 72 to Track 75 could be interpreted as a life picking up dangerous speed before slamming on the breaks and managing a soft landing.

A stripped-down and satisfying ring-a-ding-ding.

On these tracks, Armisen recognizes a curious and unacknowledged cultural phenomenon: European hotel doors and their latches sound so much more substantial and reassuringly protective than their American counterparts.

Hey, it happens.

Armisen has played the skins with The B-52s and Devo at SNL50: The Homecoming Concert and paid comic homage to Tito Puente with his percussionist character Fericito (“I’m just keeeding!“). So, to hear him trying out various cymbals with is-it-real-or-shtick wonder in his voice — “Nice,”  “Oh, I like this,”  “What’s this here,  “Very cool,” “Hmm” — makes this track particularly enjoyable. “There’s a China crash in there,” he says before leaving. That’s a bo-shaped cymbal that makes a big, trashy and abrasively provocative noise, which must really get a disrupter like Armisen going.

Giving the drummer some… EQ love.

If Armisen recorded all of these tracks (and, as the previous entries show, there are more) during one visit — and if he did so unrecognized during business hours — store security must have been at DEFCON 2. No real twists here, except some of the choices made. Track 9 disorients as electric guitar gives way to silence instead of acoustic guitar. Track 14 is distinguished by non-musical sounds: the crinkle of paper and the ka-chunk of a stapler.

Armisen cycles through audience behavior on these six tracks. Pre-show chatter and the-show-is-starting etiquette are addressed in tracks 25-27. Tracks 20, 23 and 24 capture their reactions to what’s on the stage, from a mild ho-ho-ho to vituperative booing. That last recording is so saturated that someone should conduct a welfare check on the performers.

Centuries of evolution spanned in 21 seconds: an electronic key fob opens a door to the stony echo of an old-world lobby.

A possibly seminal track of a new style of dance music, EHDM: Electronic Home Depot Music.

Tension and insincerity coalesce with plane white noise to anchor this unsettling track about a delayed flight. “We’re real excited about this and look forward to…,” Armisen says to pacify the client on the other end. Sure he is.

Paul Simon traveled to Africa to expand his musical horizons. Armisen went to Europe. On this track, he works with a unusual style of percussion — a spinning drum packed with wet clothes — and a soundscape that could be described as “extra rinse.”

Armisen, like Nick Lowe, apparently loves the sound of breaking glass. This 11-track suite of shattering drinkware is like sitting through a very long Jewish wedding. The final tracks involve cleaning up the shards, and, heard in succession, Armisen seems to be saying, “Have a good time, but clean up your mess.”

A groovy ghoulie glissando that lasts just 12 seconds. Because the dead don’t do encores.

This one’s all wheat, no chaff. The exertions of the campesino evoke the stunning landscapes of Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven. You can almost smell the rich earth and stubborn weeds.

A tense banger played with a sharp knife, and by the sound of them, some turnips and an unforgiving carrot or two. It’s like experiencing The Menu without the visuals.

The affectless automated woman’s voice announcing “doors closing” and the mechanized music of the elevator deftly captures the alienation and claustrophobia an American can feel in a foreign land.

A clever sonic take on the show-don’t-tell rule of literary writing; there’s no brogue or leprechauns on this track. Just the distinct sound of an Accessible Pedestrian Signal in the Emerald Isle’s most famous city. At least according to the title. Some of the tracks on this album were recorded in Romania. Crossing signals there may sound the same.

A ’70s psych-rock flashback: Pink Floyd’s “Brain Damage” meets Keith Moon’s gong. Actually, it’s a room-service cloche, but use your imagination for once.

A little bauhaus on the prairie! A simple function — the hand-washing of textiles — captured on a recording submitted for mass production. Could be an homage to any number of Sony Pictures Classics films from the 1980s.

Armisen’s appreciation for Devo peeks through here. “What is triangle?” he asks himself sotto voce — that’s the confusion (It stands for bleach, Fred!) Could be a downtempo dada twist on Are We Not Men? Sparse beeping and clothes flopping follow, begging the question: Did Brian Eno lend an uncredited hand in this?

Armisen scores with two tracks of atonal, banging, screaching industrial metal. The sparse lyrics of “Shipping Container Door Opening” —”Back up, back up. Everybody move. Move back” — add a delicious frisson of dread.

Armisen takes a page from the Trent Reznor-Atticus Ross playbook. With Teeth, indeed!

Armisen defies convention here, evoking anxiety in what is supposed to be the lighthearted act of wrapping a present in festive paper. The cutting, folding and taping are heavy handed, labored and hurried, as if the purpose of the gift was realized at the last minute — or, perhaps, its recipient is a frenemy who will make life hell if not pacified by something shiny on a designated special day. Like a mother.

This one’s for Halloween haters. It’s a halfhearted, resentful browse through racks of dingy old clothes, hangers screeching as they slide on metal racks — faster and faster — until a last-ditch solution is found. Play this for The Fleshtones and a brain-melting occasion-appropriate song might result.

Captures the insecurity over security when auto rentals are involved. “It’s locked. No. Ah, there we go,” says Armisen with an eventual note of everyman relief in his voice, which makes this car-door-closing track funny, and a cut above the others.

Were this Michelangelo Antonioni or Vittorio De Sica, the signora yelling would be relegated to a second-floor window or just voice in the background. Armisen courageously puts her up front and center. Her lines — which roughly translate to, “The boys have arrived. Guys, we have to go. Let’s all go to the square” — may seem innocuous, but this being an important film, words are rarely wasted. Someone’s probably going to die.

It’s tempting to call this one audio verité, but veterans of museum video room exits will carp that Armisen doesn’t flee the pretension soon enough.

Like Matteo Lane’s genius “Every White Woman Has This Conversation” bit, these Americana-style tracks cannily capture the typical banality of men — Armisen and Heidecker — who like roughing it. Conversation topics include complaining about the camping ground’s unnecessary security procedures, the demands of work and checking out a river while it’s still daylight. Bring a sleeping bag.

If this one doesn’t leave listeners wondering WTF just happened, fetch the emergency defibrillator!

More like the sound of 40 dogs with shock collars and cement paws being zapped in 2/4 time. Funny? Yes, unless they are actually dogs.

A lo-fi number that encapsulates the experience of music fans who discover a band before they break — the same fans left feeling angry when the act breaks big, and their early loyalty and good taste turns out to mean nothing. The “Where’s Jim?” shout feels tacked on though. If there’s a demo without it, it’s a must for the deluxe reissue.

Without a single lyric, Armisen captures the fru…fru…frustration of arriving at a quaint, old-world hotel for a two-week stay and discovering you have to drag your overstuffed suitcase up three flights of stairs.

Gasps, “Mmm-hmm” “Yep!” “That’s right!” A succinct, timely reflection of the political climate, where audiences — left- or right-leaning — gravitate to overheated art that preaches to the converted.

The zipping and Velcro ripping don’t exactly cry out, “12-chord blues Delta Blues progression.” But then, out of nowhere comes “Tug on the end there,” a double entendre that would have made Robert Johnson jealous.

Crunchy guitar? Hellz no! This is Fred Armisen. He brings you satisfyingly crunchy pebbles — three ways.

A shrewd sound effect for a parallel universe. Not only do flight attendants never offer to retrieve items from the overhead compartment for passengers, anyone who asks them risks being duct-taped to their seat and arrested when the plane lands.

The question here: Is the performer on the track being punked? The listener? Armisen, as part of a three-person sound crew, initially says, “The mic’s not working.” Then says, “We can hear you fine.” And his colleagues agree. “You don’t even need the mic,” says one. Except, you can’t hear the person with the mic. As Depeche Mode sings, “Enjoy the silence.” As Armisen might say, “Savor the confusion!”

By sequencing these tracks one after the other, Armisen makes a statement about the continuum between real and fake. The fake applause and booing sounds real; the supportive booing sounds fake; and the obligatory laughs sound like heavy breathing. Creepy!

Cheekily asks the question, “Does disappointment sound different in a foreign country?” Not at first — but then someone says, “That’s terrible,” with an Irish brogue.

Two very different-sounding tracks about the same frustrating thing: Tetris-ing perishables into an unyielding refrigerator. Track 77 is 15 seconds of refrigerator doors slamming, bags rustling and bottles clanking. On Track 78, the noises are minimal and the futility of the attempt becomes apparent almost immediately, when the hotel guest mutters, “Mmm-nnnn.” It’s got to be the goddamned mini-bar.

Armisen does for zippers what Pere Ubu did for the theremin on these four tracks. There’s nothing quite as catchy as “We Have the Technology” or “Waiting For Mary,” but the tracks have, um, teeth.

Music for Airports if King Crimson had released it. The track layers airplane mechanical noise, “fasten seatbelt” chimes, Armisen adopting a good-old-boy drawl for the phone conversation, and a woman talking about a restaurant meal she had — an appetizer of “fig stuffed with blue cheese and wrapped in bacon” and “a cocktail with ginseng” to “you know, expand my horizons.” At just 42 seconds, it’s a tiny fraction of the length of a typical prog-rock epic, but that’s one of the reasons so many people hate prog-rock.

Now, this is art. A Sharpie on a basketball doubles as an ode to 1980s hip-hop scratching. Ricky-ricky-Rick Barry!

Dada’s home! Electronic drum kits with headphone jacks usually also come with electronic cymbals so the drummer can practice without inviting violence from a neighbor. The flat thuds produced by sticks hitting synthetic drum pads combined with the crashing of actual cymbals creates a kind of (literal?) cognitive dissonance that, safe to say, has never before appeared on a sound effects recording. NSFN: not safe for neighbors.

The good thing about listening to a recorded track of a self-delulu artiste’s (Armisen) cringey monologue about a bodega’s “world of boxes and bottles and voices” and resident cat: you don’t have to worry about drawing attention when you leave early. When it comes to irritating earnestness, Armisen has no equal.

Sound guy (Armisen): “Hey, I’m good out here. If you’re good.” Musician onstage (Rajskub): “Yeah, yeah, I’m good. Sounds good.” Sound guy: “Monitors okay?” Musician:”Yeah, sounds great. How do you think it sounds?” Sound guy: “I think it’s great. I’m good if you’re good.” Musician: “I’m goood. Good on your end, good for me.” The exchange lasts more than a minute. Rock is dead-ly dull sometimes, and as Armisen said in an interview, sound check conversations like these actually happen.

Terror expressed through speed clapping that’s often accompanied by a cold sweat and an airtight sphincter. Let’s see if it’s still funny in 2028.

Bill Burr’s great bit about the “sad men” who haunt Guitar Center comes to mind on this inspired bit of cacophony. Imagine those lost boys looking to get their mojo back in the mix with a bunch of sugared-up kids who imagine themselves the next Machine Gun Kelly — all banging on their instrument of choice. It’s not as entertaining as Tig Notaro‘s confidently clueless piano playing, but it’s only 31 seconds long. Happy f—king holidays!

Co-creator of the seriously bananas and sadly short-lived HBO series, Los Espookys, and star of the future Wednesday spinoff series as Uncle Fester, Armisen kills when sending up horror tropes. This track features lots of initially unintelligible moaning and rasping whispers, but eventually, his repeating of “Mira los ojos!” over and over, becomes clearer and increasingly louder — “MIRA LOS O—HOS!” — until it’s a gut-busting comedic koan.

Armisen-as-Ghost announces himself with a full-throated BLARAaaaah! But is it a haunted house or a depressing New York studio apartment? The specter immediately concludes — in a diminished, disapointed voice — that the place is empty.

Things that make you go, hmm… when you’re dead. Armisen World is full of surprises, and one of them is that ghosts don’t follow canon and pass through walls. Try not to lose it when Fred the Ghost simply gives up.

“We are closed! Out you go! We are done!” If the bellowed introduction to The Replacements’ “Kids Don’t Follow” was an angry, bottle-smashing nightclub staffer (Armisen) at closing time — not a Minneapolis cop dispersing a rowdy group of ‘Mats fans — you’d get this masterpiece. In both cases, the audience isn’t going quietly, but nobody yells, “Hey f—k you, maaaan,” on this track. That’s a good thing, because no one will ever have to listen to a parade of dudes claiming they or their father was that guy.