SURROUND SOUND BANG! BOING! SPLAT!

The actor and comedian Fred Armisen phoned the front desk from his room at a midtown hotel the other day, and asked the clerk to call right back.

- Michael Schulman

"I'm not going to pick up," he explained. "I'll just let it ring for a little bit, if you don't mind."Moments later, the phone rang-a rattly landline brrring and Armisen recorded it with a mike. "That's useful," he said, pleased.

Armisen, whose comedic confections include the hipster-utopia sketch show "Portlandia" and the Netflix special "Standup for Drummers," spent months considering sounds and their subtexts for his latest project, an album called "100 Sound Effects," which Drag City will release next month. He tried to capture subtleties: How does the metallic slam of a rental-car door differ from the polite click of a fancy car service dropping you off? Other tracks include "Obligatory Applause at a Speech," "Tentative Sawing," and "Band Sound Check Sound Guy and Band Agreeing for Too Long." ("If you're happy, I'm happy.") "I was lamenting that there aren't sound-effects albums in our lives as much, or in my life," Armisen said. "I feel like they used to exist more." Growing up, he had Halloween albums with spooky sounds which you could play at a haunted house. His own record features such specialized tracks as "Haunted House Ghost but Nobody Is Home" (a lonely little raaaah).

He created most of the effects at a recording studio in L.A., using classic Foley methods like crinkling plastic to simulate the crackling of a campfire. Others he captured in the field.