Echoes of the Emerald Sands (Tigerlilly Vinyl)

Ted Feighan has never been interested in staying in one lane for too long - even if that means forging a new lane of his own. When the producer, multi-instrumentalist, and visual artist better known as Monster Rally began work on his tenth full-length record Echoes of the Emerald Sands, out now via Flowering Jungle, he gave himself a straightforward set of criteria: Make something unlike anything he'd made before. For someone with tastes and an artistic history as eclectic as Feighan's, that's easier said than done. With Echoes of the Emerald Sands, Feighan decided to recruit a whole fleet of artists and industry friends to sing over his recordings. The list of collaborators includes TV Girl, Jordana, Toledo, Mei Semones, X-Cetra, Leisure, Sessa, Nella, Miles Michaud (Allah-Las), Benét, Jordann, Munya, and more. For the new album, he also ditched the tropical, sample-based plunderphonics that had defined his work since Monster Rally's 2010 inception, instead recording everything from scratch at his Cleveland home studio. Before Feighan began his Monster Rally project, he spent his teen and early adult years performing in various bands, including the Myspace-era screamo band Driver Side Impact. Around that time, Feighan also started collecting vinyl, and he found himself particularly drawn to cover art that felt warm and peaceful. Referring back to his lifelong love for hip-hop and the producers famed for their sample-based beats, Feighan picked up a Roland SP303 sampler and pored over his vinyl. Monster Rally was born. From Monster Rally's 2010 debut EP to 2022's Botanica Dream, he mined that vinyl collection for a stream of psychedelic beats that evoked scenes of equatorial climates and lush, faraway landscapes - not unlike the collage-based visual art he makes for himself and clients like Topo Chico, June Shine and Urban Outfitters. Echoes of the Emerald Sands is an unequivocal testament to his adventurous, curious artistic spirit.