Join Ears of Maize on Monday, January 12th at 4pm to hear his recent conversation with eclectic producer, multi-instrumentalist, and visual artist, Ted Feighan aka Monster Rally, ahead of his upcoming live performance at Cafe du Nord in San Francisco on January 21st.
Tune in to hear all about Feighan’s soon to be released full length album, Echoes of the Emerald Sands, his exciting new approach to the long standing Monster Rally project, and a sneak peek into his writing and creative process.
As Ted began working on his new record, 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 varied as Monster Rally’s, that’s easier said than done.
Venturing into uncharted territory, the upcoming record will be Monster Rally’s first that isn’t purely instrumental. He recruited not just one or two guest vocalists, but 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. Ditching the tropical, sample-based plunderphonics of his past work, he decided to record everything from scratch in his Cleveland home studio — resulting in some of the liveliest, most vivid music in Monster Rally history.
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 poured 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 a wide array of clients. Echoes of the Emerald Sands is an unequivocal testament to his adventurous, curious artistic spirit.
