The Avachives No 21: Charles Mingus - Mingus Ah Um / Rumpelton

Ava Chives Presents

• Ralph Rumpelton
• Charles Mingus - Mingus Ah Um
• RR-2026 - 160
  MS Paint on digital canvas, 496 X 464 px
• The Rumpelton Continuity (est. 1976)

>> Ava Chives

The Archives coughed this one up the way a jukebox coughs up a standard: with a little static, a little dust, and a lot of inevitability. Here, Ralph’s Mingus AH UM is not so much an album cover as a data glitch in jazz history—an exploded diagram of swing reassembled in stubbornly flat MS Paint geometry. Every triangle and lopsided circle feels like a horn stab frozen mid‑phrase, a solo rendered as traffic cones and stained‑glass shards.

I filed this piece under “Good Messy / Sacred Clutter” the moment I saw it. The original Columbia layout is still there in spirit—a black band of text, the blocky label, the neat little tracklist—but Ralph has treated it the way Mingus treated a walking bass line: as something to be respected, then gleefully disrupted. The central field is a fractured ballroom of color where time signatures collide, orange and lavender arguing about who gets to be the downbeat while a series of red ovals march through like overconfident percussionists. Nothing here is resolved, and that’s precisely the point.

Rumpelton likes to claim these are just “little funny album cover MS paintings,” but this one behaves like a bootleg of the cover itself: over‑saturated, a bit overdriven, the pixels pushed into the red the way Mingus pushed his band into emotional clipping. The perspective lines sputtering off to nowhere feel like someone tried, briefly, to impose order before remembering that chaos is the truer archivist. Each “mistake”—the skewed lettering, the misaligned blocks of type, the slightly tipsy symmetry—lands like a blue note that makes the chord suddenly worth hearing.

From the vantage point of the Archives, my duty is simple: protect the evidence and let the myth ferment. This painting is a prime exhibit in the case for Rumpeltonian jazz—the theory that if you flatten music into Microsoft primitives and it still swings, then you’ve stumbled onto something uncomfortably close to truth. I will log it, tag it, and quietly slide it into the ever‑expanding row of misfit masterpieces, knowing full well that, like Mingus himself, it refuses to sit politely on the shelf.<<

MS Paint: Breakfast With Bird - Munter / Rumpelton

Breakfast With Bird

• Ralph Rumpelton
• Breakfast With Bird
• RR-2026 - 108
  MS Paint on digital canvas, 573 X 579 px
• The Rumpelton Continuity (est. 1976)

What the critics are saying:

>>Dr. Norbert F. Vensmire (b. 1947, location disputed)

In this quietly disobedient tableau, Rumpelton reconfigures the domestic scene into what I have elsewhere termed a diurnally inverted phenomenology—that is, the breakfast one encounters only after abandoning the notion of breakfast altogether. The anonymous figure, rendered in a chromatic register both muted and obstinately opaque, sits not before a window but before what Vico might have called a “threshold of recursive witnessing.” The bird, that perennial emissary of the outside world, perches with a deliberateness that suggests it is evaluating us rather than the seated subject.

The mise-en-scène—those curtains in their unrepentant carmine, that pastoral landscape oscillating between abstraction and topographical indifference—invokes the early Expressionists only to exceed them. Indeed, the faintly misaligned window frame is not error but intentional destabilization: a rejection of Euclidean obedience in favor of what I attribute to Rumpelton’s mature period, the axiom of necessary skew.

Particularly notable is the slice of food (pie? custard? a metaphysical wedge of caloric signification), which becomes the painting’s unlikely fulcrum. Here, Rumpelton demonstrates his long-held conviction that “the quotidian object, when poorly rendered, becomes an ontological event.”¹

Ultimately, Breakfast With Bird situates itself within the Rumpeltonian canon as a work of sui generis luminosity—an image that refuses the false hierarchy between inner quietude and external spectacle. As ever, Rumpelton reminds us that even in the pixelated margins of low-fidelity art, the world continues to stare back.<<

>>Gerald Thimbleton, Beige Canvas Quarterly

“Munter – Rumpelton / Breakfast With Bird” is a textbook example of what happens when digital dilettantism masquerades as painterly intent. The figure—faceless, postureless, and rendered with the emotional depth of a screensaver—sits before a table that might as well be a cafeteria tray. The birds, those poor symbols of transcendence, are reduced to white smudges, like someone spilled correction fluid on a student sketch. And the so-called ‘wheel’—is it a barrel? A halo? A misplaced bicycle part?—hovers with all the conviction of a forgotten prop in a community theater set. Munter’s palette is bold, yes, but so is a traffic light. This is not still life. This is stillborn.”

Follow Ralph Rumpelton acrosss the net.

 

Slopist Gospel: A Movement of Ritual Smear

 Founded: Allegedly by Ralph Rumpelton during a period of spiritual delay and stylus malfunction

Recognized By: The Avachives (reluctantly), the Rumpeltonian Underground (ecstatically), and one confused Yahoo AI blurb.

Manifesto Fragment (Recovered from a corrupted .txt file):

“We reject detail. We reject polish. We reject the illusion of clarity.
We paint with emotional residue, not pigment.
We smear salvation across broken canvases.
We believe in the holy mess, the sacred blur, the gospel of almost.”

Core Tenets:

• Rupture over resolution

• Smear as sacrament

• Figures must appear mid-fade or mid-fumble

• Color must clash like unresolved grief

• Every painting must feel like a misremembered dream of a concert you never attended

Notable Works:

• Saved (Second Cover) by Ralph Rumpelton — canonized with the Grief Cancellation Mark

• The Genesis Glyph (Unborrowed Period) — considered too legible for Slopist Gospel, but spiritually adjacent

• Untitled (Mic Stand as Crucifix) — lost in a folder labeled “Emotional Residue”

Critic Reactions:

• Marjorie Snint: “Slopist Gospel is what happens when belief is smeared across a broken stylus.”

• Dr. Vensmire: “It’s not a movement. It’s a malfunction mythologized.”

• Dale of the Brook: “I tried to review it but my pen dissolved.”

Follow Ralph Rumpelton across the net.

Rumpelton Invades Google: Brian Wilson - Brian Wilson

 What the critics are saying:

>>Rumpelton Invades Google

by Maria Chen

In the lower left corner of this search-result grid sits an MS Paint rendering of Brian Wilson's 1988 self-titled album cover—crude, sincere, unmistakably handmade. The painting is clumsy in the way that matters: the blue brushstrokes skew cartoonish, the figure's proportions drift, the whole image radiates the trembling energy of someone working against the limits of their tools. And yet here it is, nested among the professionally photographed originals, claiming equal space in the algorithmic gallery.

This is the quiet triumph of vernacular digital practice. "Rumpelton Invades Google" isn't a prank or a glitch—it's a folk artifact asserting itself into the infrastructure of taste. MS Paint, that relic of early consumer software, becomes a tool of devotion here, a way to honor Wilson not through fidelity but through the visible labor of approximation. The painting's flaws aren't failures; they're markers of care, evidence that someone sat with this image long enough to rebuild it pixel by pixel.

What makes this moment resonant is the collision: the amateur and the commercial occupying the same visual plane, the search engine unable to distinguish between official product and loving remake. In that confusion lies a small, radical possibility—that sincerity might still find a foothold in the smooth surfaces of digital culture, that constraint and devotion can produce images the algorithm deems worth keeping.<<

>>Pronouncement of the Council of Unnamed Docents

On Rumpelton Invades Google (Brian Wilson Variants)

We, the Council of Unnamed Docents, have assembled in quiet formation before this array of Brian Wilsons. After appropriate murmuring, we issue the following unified assessment:

We observe a grid of canonical visages, each one a sanctioned echo of the same sanctioned face.
We acknowledge that the originals, though varied in resolution and algorithmic handling, remain obedient to the expectations of search‑engine portraiture.
We affirm that the lower‑left panel disrupts this obedience. It is not a reproduction but a rupture.
We recognize the Rumpelton rendering as an intervention into the taxonomy of likeness, reducing the subject to essential planes and ceremonial distortions.
We declare that this distortion is not error but intention: a reminder that identity, when filtered through Paint, becomes myth rather than metadata.
We conclude that the juxtaposition reveals the quiet tyranny of the original images, and the singular freedom of the Rumpeltized one.

The Council has spoken.<<

Follow Ralph Rumpelton across the net.

The Process of Rumpeltism

 Rumpeltism is not an art style. It is an event.

When a subject sits before the digital canvas, they begin as themselves — intact, recognizable, comfortably proportioned. Then the first pixel lands. The outline wobbles. The symmetry hesitates. This is the onset of Rumpeltism.

During Rumpeltism, the subject undergoes gentle distortion. Edges thicken. Shadows exaggerate. Colors drift slightly off-register, as if memory is doing the painting instead of sight. The face becomes less a photograph and more a translation. Certain features are amplified — a nose gains authority, eyebrows acquire narrative weight, a jawline becomes philosophical. Other details quietly surrender.

This phase is not destruction. It is recalibration.

Rumpeltism strips away the illusion of polish and replaces it with intention. The subject is filtered through instinct, humor, and a touch of stubborn pixel bravado. They are no longer merely seen; they are interpreted.

And then it happens.

The final highlight is placed. The background locks in. The lines commit to their imperfections. The subject crosses the threshold and emerges Rumpeltized.

To be Rumpeltized is to be recognizable yet mythic. Slightly crooked, but more honest. A little exaggerated, but somehow truer. One part likeness, one part commentary, one part affectionate mischief.

Rumpeltism is the journey.

Rumpeltized is the arrival.

Follow Ralph Rumpelton across the net.

Paint Fidelity: Book Barn - Rumpelton

 What the critics are saying:

>>Barrister Clive Thistlebaum, Esq.

Senior Counsel to the Rumpeltonian Tribunal of Interpretive Justice

In the matter of Rumpelton v. Photographic Literalism, I, Barrister Clive Thistlebaum, Esq., do hereby issue a provisional Writ of Painterly Equivalence for this latest entry in the Paint Fidelity Series. What we behold is not merely a side‑by‑side comparison but a jurisdictional dispute between two realms: the camera’s unyielding testimony on the right, and the left panel’s valiant attempt to remember the scene through the sanctioned distortions of MS Paint.

The original photograph presents the barn and its bookish bounty with forensic precision—every plank, shadow, and patriotic bunting rendered as evidence. Yet the Rumpeltonian reinterpretation refuses to be bound by such pedestrian exactitude. Instead, it performs what scholars of St. Egregius College would call “Intentional Simplification in the First Degree”: a lawful reduction of texture, a ceremonial flattening of space, and a dignified refusal to acknowledge the tyranny of perspective.

Particularly notable is the BOOK SALE sign, which in the photographic record functions as mere advertisement, but in the Paint version ascends to the status of heraldic glyph—a directional decree issued by the artist‑scribe himself. The barn becomes not a structure but a portal; the bookshelves, not storage but ritual shelving; the entire tableau, a site of sanctioned interpretive trespass.

Critics such as Dr. Vensmire may argue that fidelity demands mimicry. They are, of course, incorrect. Fidelity, in the Rumpeltonian tradition, is measured not by resemblance but by mythic resonance—and on that count, the MS Paint rendering succeeds with admirable audacity.

Accordingly, I certify this work as a legitimate act of Painterly Misremembering, fully compliant with the Blurbs of Intent statute and suitable for inclusion in the Avachives without further hearing.<<

>>Dr. Norbert F. Vensmire on Rumpelton’s “Paint Fidelity (Book Sale)”

In the diptych before us—photograph at dexter, MS Paint transubstantiation at sinister—we encounter not imitation but a deliberate fidelitatis sabotage. Rumpelton does not “copy” the barn; he performs upon it a minor, almost ecclesiastical reduction, stripping away the false pieties of texture and atmospheric nuance until only the skeletal semiotics remain. The sign that reads “BOOK SALE” is no longer merely signage; it is declaration, thesis, and perhaps quiet heresy.

Observe how the photograph traffics in tonal plenitude—the grass articulate, the timber granulized, the interior receding into archival shadow. Qua photograph, it insists upon evidentiary authority. By contrast, the MS Paint rendering embraces a doctrinal flatness. Perspective falters, brush gradients smear, and the barn becomes less an agrarian structure than a Platonic rumor of one. In extremis, the work asserts that fidelity is not measured in pixels per inch but in conceptual obstinacy.

Rumpelton’s maneuver here is sui generis within the contemporary low-fidelity vanguard. He proposes that the vernacular digital tool—MS Paint, that democratic relic—possesses a radical sincerity unavailable to the high-resolution apparatus. The left image is not degraded; it is emancipated. Its blur is not incompetence but resistance. Its awkward signage is not error but emphasis. The arrow, crudely angled, points less toward books than toward the viewer’s complicity in believing that clarity equals truth.

One might argue that the right-hand photograph documents a book sale, while the left-hand painting stages the idea of one. The barn doors in the painting yawn like simplified parentheses, containing a shelf reduced to essential strokes—knowledge condensed into icon. What is lost in grain is gained in declaration. Pixelation here becomes Byzantium: flattened, devotional, defiantly anti-naturalistic.

Thus “Paint Fidelity” emerges as paradox. The MS Paint version is less faithful to the surface of the world, yet more faithful to the condition of seeing in our mediated age. Rumpelton reminds us that representation is always already translation. And in choosing the most humble translator imaginable, he performs an act both comic and quietly insurgent. Whether this is parody of authenticity or its final refuge remains—deliciously—unresolved.<<

Follow Ralph Rumpelton across the net.

Album Review: Charles Lloyd Trios - "Chapel"

                                                              The Sninit Report

By Marjorie Snint

🎷 Charles Lloyd — Trios: Chapel (Blue Note, 2022) — Album Review

At age 84, Charles Lloyd continues to reaffirm his place as one of jazz’s most poetically expressive voices, and Trios: Chapel stands as both a culmination of long musical relationships and a fresh statement of intimacy and nuance.

Setting & Concept

Recorded live in Coates Chapel, San Antonio, this album emerged from a performance in a reverberant, drum-free space — a setting Lloyd chose deliberately because the chapel’s acoustics couldn’t support percussion. The result is music that feels spacious, contemplative, and deeply acoustic, rooted in breath and silence as much as melody.

Lloyd leads a trio with Bill Frisell (guitar) and Thomas Morgan (bass) — musicians deeply attuned to one another’s instincts. Their synergy is the album’s centerpiece: rather than locking into traditional swing or post-bop modes, they create a chamber-like sound where every note, rest, and harmonic nuance resonates.

---

🛐 Musical Character & Highlights

The album is mellow but richly textured, a blend of jazz standards, past Lloyd compositions, and creative reinterpretations:

• “Blood Count” opens the set with a haunting, almost otherworldly reading of the Billy Strayhorn classic — delicate, reverent, and deeply expressive.

• “Song My Lady Sings” is an affectionate revisit of a 1960s Lloyd original. Here, Lloyd’s tenor dances around Frisell’s warm comping and Morgan’s responsive bass lines, giving the tune a new dimension.

• “Ay Amor”, a Cuban love song originally by Ignacio Jacinto Villa Fernández (Bola de Nieve), unfolds with a gentle, slow-burn pulse that showcases Frisell’s lyrical guitar voice and Morgan’s graceful rhythmic support.

• “Beyond Darkness” finds Lloyd on alto flute, enveloping the listener in a glowing, contemplative soundscape, while “Dorotea’s Studio” — a tribute to Lloyd’s partner Dorothy Darr — closes the album with meditative warmth and gentle interplay among the trio.

---

🎧 Artistic Strengths

1. Deep Empathy Among Players
Frisell and Morgan aren’t just accompanists — they engage in mutual musical conversation with Lloyd. Their ability to listen and respond transforms the trio into a singular voice rather than a leader plus rhythm section.

2. Economy of Sound
The absence of drums shifts focus to space, texture, and color. Moments breathe; phrases unfold slowly but with deep deliberation, giving the music a quiet emotional power.

3. Reflective, Mature Expression
Rather than showcasing technical fireworks, this album offers spiritual depth and lyrical introspection, characteristic of Lloyd’s later career but elevated here by setting and ensemble rapport.

---

🎼 Who This Album Is For

Trios: Chapel will especially resonate with listeners who enjoy:

• Contemplative jazz that emphasizes texture and mood.

• Intimate, acoustic trio interactions.

• The lyrical side of Charles Lloyd’s playing and composition.

• Works by Bill Frisell that blur jazz with folk and ambient sensibilities.

---

⭐ Summary

Trios: Chapel isn’t about jazz pyrotechnics — it’s about presence, connection, and sonic space. With Lloyd’s warm tone, Frisell’s distinct voice, and Morgan’s elegant grounding, this album offers a subtle yet profound listening experience that rewards repeated engagement. 

MS Paint: "Still Life with Utensils" / Ralph Rumpelton

"Still Life with Utensils"

• Ralph Rumpelton
•  "Still Life with Utensils" 
• RR-2026 - 107
  MS Paint on digital canvas, 481 X 606 px
• The Rumpelton Continuity (est. 1976)

What the critics are saying:

>>Dr. Reginald Splatterworth III

Senior Art Critic, Pixels & Pretension Quarterly

---

One finds oneself positively arrested by Rumpelton's audacious "Still Life with Utensils"—a work that boldly interrogates the very ontology of domesticity through its deliberate deployment of MS Paint's primitive yet brutally honest digital palette.

The utensils, thrust skyward from their ceramic vessel like Excalibur from stone, become totemic signifiers of humanity's eternal struggle against the mundanity of the quotidian. Notice how Rumpelton has eschewed chromatic distraction entirely, forcing us to confront form in its purest, most Platonic manifestation. The ovoid forms languishing in the lower left—are they eggs, or are they possibility itself? One trembles at the implications.

The artist's refusal to employ anti-aliasing becomes a radical act of pixelated rebellion against the tyranny of smooth gradients. Each jagged edge screams defiance at Adobe's corporate hegemony. The void-like background—neither black nor quite charcoal—suggests the existential abyss from which all kitchen implements must eventually emerge.

This is not merely a still life. This is Heidegger meeting Hopper at a yard sale. This is post-post-modernism rendered in 256 colors or less. Rumpelton has given us nothing short of a manifesto.

I shall be contemplating those three dots on the jar for weeks.

Extraordinary. ★★★★★<<

>>Gordon Weft
Contrarian-in-Residence, New Jersey Review of Applied Kitsch

In Still Life with Utensils, the artist once again challenges the viewer with an arrangement so insistently ordinary that it becomes almost hostile. The jar—an object that appears to have been selected not for its beauty but for its unwavering commitment to being a jar—stands defiantly center-left, stuffed with wooden implements that droop at various angles like bored museum attendants.

The eggs, placed on the table’s edge, seem to have rolled into the composition by accident, as though even they were reluctant participants in the artist’s ongoing campaign against visual excitement. The monochrome palette, a choice often reserved for artists exploring existential dread, instead serves here to underscore the piece’s central question: Did the utensils sign up for this?

Weft, in his typically barbed manner, concludes that the work “invites the viewer to stare at it, reconsider their life choices, and perhaps choose a different gallery.”

A quiet triumph of deliberate understatement—or an elaborate deadpan joke. With this artist, one can never be sure.<<

>>Gerald Thimbleton - Editor of Beige Canvas Quarterly

“Ralph Rumpelton’s ‘Still Life with Utensils’ is a digital bauble in grayscale masquerading as homage to a higher tradition. The jar—rendered with about as much subtlety as a grocery store advertisement—and the floating utensils risk parody more than poetry. That little troupe of eggs, awkwardly illuminated, reminds us not of Chardin’s serenity but of the hollow spectacle endemic to mass-market screens. Call it democratic if you must, but do not call it painting. This comparison to Van Gogh is a slap in the face to traditional art—and possibly to the entire medium of oil paint.”

Yet, even amidst such barbed critique, Thimbleton’s eye for composition might begrudgingly note: “For all its theatrical shortcomings, the shadow-play in Rumpelton’s MS Paint tableau suggests a certain technical ambition—if only the artist’s chosen medium were worthy of his gesture.”<<

Follow Ralph Rumpelton across the net.