The Sounds of Summer, with Fred Armisen
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The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC and The New Yorker.
This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm Adam Howard, sitting in today for David Remnick. Fred Armisen has a thing about sound. You might have heard his bit where he claims to be able to imitate every accent in American speech.
Pittsburgh, you go there, you go there to Pittsburgh. And then down to Baltimore, motor oil. I always think motor oil, Baltimore, motor oil. Then down to Virginia.
And on Saturday Night Live, he co-wrote the recurring sketch about how people talk in Los Angeles.
Get back on San Vicente, take it to the 10, then switch over to the 405 North and let it dump you out into Mulholland where you belong.
Armisen even made an album called 100 Sound Effects. The track titles are like little punchlines. Glass Falls But Doesn't Break. Music Store Around Christmas. Last summer, the New Yorkers' Michael Schulman met up with Fred Armisen, and they went out to do some sound recording of their own on the summer streets of New York.
Well, hi. Hi. So I played this album for myself and my cat last night. She was confused. Uh-huh. There are no birds on it, I don't think, so she was not that interested.
That'd have to be a separate album for animals, because they're a different audience.
Okay, let's start with the basics. Like, what is this thing, and how did you come to do it? 100 Sound Effects. It was kind of like...
I was lamenting that there aren't sound effects albums in our lives as much or in my life. I feel like they just used to exist more or they were more present. Like there'd be like a Halloween one. You just see them everywhere. I thought, I was like, oh, I should make one. Just like the titles of the ones that used to exist were always like, you know, door closing, you know, there'd be like some street sounds, sirens, like airplane sounds and stuff. So it was just from that, I was like, well, what would a new version of it be like? And instead of just, you know, taking out my phone and just recording stuff, I wanted to treat it properly. Like, let me go to a recording studio and really do it. Let me try to mimic some things that I've heard before.
And it really kind of took about a year of booking more time at a studio and then a few things out on the street. But it was mostly studio stuff.
When you picture people listening to this album, what do you picture? Are people like sitting and listening very intently or is it background noise? I picture someone – in reality, I picture someone playing it for their friend.
Oh, that's fun. It's more like, hey, look what just came out. And so not going through the whole thing, but just playing little parts of it. And then it looks good in the record collection. So it's like not in the music section.
It's like, oh, then here's a sound effects record that actually came out more recently. Right. Well, I mean, it's like a novelty item. Kind of. But also maybe practical. That would be a dream. I mean, you mentioned the sort of classic sound effects albums that you used to see. Did you own them growing up? Did you own these?
Only Halloween ones. I remember ghoul sounds, you know. And I guess they'd be used for, you know, Haunted Mansion amusement, you know, like during Halloween. Oh, actually, I had a G.I. Joe single. The toy G.I.
Joe.
And I think those were heavy on sound effects. They weren't advertised that way, but there was a lot of crawling through the dirt kind of stuff.
War sounds for toys. Or adventure sounds. Oh, yeah, yeah.
Gotta grab this rock. Almost got it.
And that kind of thing. Wow, it is a lost art form, truly. Yeah, yeah. So the sounds are subdivided. Was that where you started, kind of like thinking about different scenarios in life, like a plane or a music store or stuff like that?
Yeah, like I started with all the music stuff. I was like, that's easy. I wanted to do someone tuning a guitar... and it's in tune except for when they strum it. It's out of tune. That happens sometimes to guitar players. They're like, I just tuned it. Why is it still out of tune?
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