Artist Profile: Kassie Carlson of Guerilla Toss

Guerilla Toss, the formerly Boston- now Brooklyn-based experimental rockers, will be releasing their second album, “Eraser Stargazer,” on DFA Records on Mar. 4. Guerilla Toss—who are known for their intricate and complex yet simultaneously funky, skronky and powerfully rhythmic compositions—are producing some of the strangest, most interesting, and most innovative sounds in the Northeast. In advance of their upcoming album release, The Crimson had the chance to talk with lead singer and lyricist Kassie Carlson about the creation of their mind-bending music: from their dense yet danceable sonic arrays to their psychedelic, imagistic, almost mythic lyrics.

The Harvard Crimson: Do you have favorite tracks on the new album?

Kassie Carlson: My two favorite tracks are definitely “Grass Shack” and “Doll Face on the Calico Highway.”....I’m most excited about these because there are these two monologues in them that are super descriptive. There are a lot of references on this album to morphing tangible and intangible things—like textures and smells and tastes turning into actual tangible things like people, like the thick merino wool, like the homeless woman on a bus, things like that. So I really enjoyed writing that type of thing and presenting that. Because at the time I was reading a lot of really beautiful, descriptive books, and I was trying to incorporate that sort of thing into the song.

THC: What inspires you as a lyricist?

KC: Looking at things under a microscope [and seeing] the complexity and beauty of and everything. I was reading a lot of Herman Hesse at the time, he’s probably one of my favorite writers, some Milan Kundera, and a lot of stuff on the brain—how that affects perception, and things like that.

THC: How does “Eraser Stargazer” compare to Guerilla Toss’s previous work?

KC: The band has definitely changed over time. When I first met everybody, like four years ago—I can’t believe it—it was more of a contemporary improvisation jazz-realm type band. When we met, I was in a punk band. So we all started playing together with a more harsh, aggressive, punk-oriented sound. Lately, I know it’s more dance-y and funky and stuff like that. But there are always the same kind of cerebral aspects of the music—like odd time signatures and weird sequencing of parts and complex lyrical stories. I still love it just the same. It’s a direct interpretation of us and how we feel. We’re not trying to be anything….Pretty much everything is through composed. There’s not really much freeform. We’ve been trying to add a chant element to the live shows…. It commits us to making every show a unique experience.

THC: What is your composition process like?

KC: Right now we’re kind of doing the same thing we did with “Eraser Stargazer” where we took a bunch of time off and we’re up in upstate New York….When we wrote “Eraser Stargazer” we would kind of only play music all day, sometimes eight hours a day, trying everything like a hundred which ways. Usually Peter, the drummer, will come in with an idea, like a small part, and we’ll all develop parts for it and kind of jam on it for a while and try to find like riffs and stuff like that. [Our composing is] very attention to detail focused—getting the sequencing of each song exactly corrected. The lyrics will be revised 100 million different times. We really really really try to put our all into it, to make sort of f---ed-up masterpieces. And in this writing zone it’s kind of all or nothing, where we all work and we’re here for like weeks at a time. For “Eraser Stargazer” it was like three-four weeks of just like only playing music. We made big family dinners together and watched movies at night. It was pretty much like working all day. That’s the way it’s always been as a band. It’s been kind of like this crazy runaway train kind of thing, where we’ve toured like so many times, and our lives just completely revolve around this band in a really we’re like. We’re all like this really weird f---ed-up family.

THC: What inspires you all, as a band, musically?

KC: I read a lot of books and listen to other people’s music. We’ve seen a lot of shows, a lot of music together, over the years. Sometimes the words for songs will come out of some really intense dream that I have at night. Like the words for “Realistic Rabbit” on “Flood Dosed”—I was having a really hard time trying to find the words to that song, for some reason, nothing seemed right that I was writing, and then I had this dream about a rabbit that was coming out of a butterfly’s chrysalis, and I woke up and I was just like “Woah” and I just wrote all the lyrics to the song right away. And that was super powerful….I guess being here in this really beautiful place, where all the moss is super green. When we were here last year, there were two or three feet of snow, the whole time, and that was obviously a really heavy experience, because it was hard to get anywhere. To remove the snow and go for a walk was a huge deal because the snow was above our knees. Leaving and coming back up to the mountain was really super crazy. We had a van and it wasn’t really very good in the snow, so like farmer people had to come and tow us out. And they were like “Oh geez, these city people again.”….I used to work at Harvard for a long time in the Natural History Museum and that was super cool. I think that was an inspiration as well….There’s all those taxidermy stuff everywhere. A lot of the time I’d work at events, like at night too, so I’d come into work and it would be all these dimly lit—sometimes with the lights off—taxidermied scary animals….It’s beautiful, even the bad taxidermy that was done over one hundred years ago. There’s this tiger taxidermy that looks like it has this big giant frown on it, like the way that someone did it, they didn’t really know how to do it. And then there’s other ones with giant seams with giant stitches, that are coming apart at the seams….And [I’m also inspired by] the detail of the Peabody museum. There was an Art of War exhibit that was just getting put in at the time I was there. It was just really beautiful to see all the Pacific Islands representations of armor and stuff that they did. There’s one—I can’t remember the specific island—the person had a fish helmet that was on his head, a whole chest-piece with all these shark teeth sewn onto it, really intricately and beautifully, and a shark-tooth sword….In the main floor of the Peabody, there’s this room that’s a Native American area. It feels humid in the room and there’s all this music going on and nature sounds, and it feels like you are in this really intense, beautiful environment. I think that’s what a lot of the record is about, taking those moments that are super visceral and describing every little microscopic bit of it.

—Staff writer Amy J. Cohn can be reached at amy.cohn@thecrimson.com