The Rumpelton Continuity

 

The Rumpelton Continuity

An Unauthorized Oral History, As Told by People Who Were There (or claim to have been)

In the early 1980s, a reclusive figure known only as Ralph Rumpelton was said to have vanished from a small town somewhere between upstate New York and a dimension best described as “poorly rendered.” According to those who knew him—three ex-roommates and a guy from a record show—Rumpelton had become obsessed with tracking the invisible thread that connects all album covers.

“He said they were trying to tell a single story,” said his old friend Jimbo. “Like, all the faces, all the skies, all the fonts—he thought they were communicating through design, like hieroglyphs. Said if you rearranged them right, it was a message to the future.”

Rumpelton began redrawing each cover in MS Paint, not because he liked it, but because it was the most difficult and most honest medium available. With every new recreation, he claimed he was getting closer to unlocking “the Master Album”—a lost LP that existed in concept only, composed entirely of echoes from other albums.

What followed became known among a tiny circle of blog readers and disoriented Reddit users as The Rumpelton Continuity—a disjointed, dazzling visual epic told through warped recreations of jazz legends, psychedelic landscapes, confused facial expressions, and ominous trees. No single piece makes complete sense. But viewed in sequence, a strange logic emerges.

The Core Principles of the Rumpelton Continuity:

• All music is one album, misunderstood in pieces.

• The background matters more than the foreground.

• Imperfection reveals the true form.

• Every hand must be slightly wrong.

• Perspective is for cowards.

Some say Rumpelton is still out there, sending these works to a middleman who posts them to the blog. Others believe Rumpelton is the blog—an AI ghost of someone who once taped Frank Zappa records off FM radio and never stopped wondering what it all meant.

Whatever the truth is, one thing is clear:
The more covers you see, the more you realize they’re not covers at all.
They’re chapters.