What the critics are saying:
>>Pixel Marx on the Paint Fidelity Series: Brand X – Moroccan Roll
There’s something beautifully defiant about attempting to “faithfully” recreate the hyper-clean surrealism of Moroccan Roll using the blunt-force instrument of MS Paint. The original cover—designed by Hipgnosis for Brand X—is all sun-bleached geometry and conceptual precision: a man in a suit framed inside a golden diagram, North African architecture stretching into an existential vanishing point. It’s prog-fusion minimalism with a side of metaphysical espionage.
But the Paint Fidelity version doesn’t chase precision. It chases memory.
Where the original speaks in sharp edges and calibrated color fields, the MS Paint translation melts the scene into sandstorm abstraction. The yellows become dust. The architecture dissolves into suggestion. The targeting circle—so exact and ominous in the Hipgnosis original—evaporates entirely, replaced by atmosphere. And in that erasure, something radical happens: the concept shifts from surveillance to solitude.
The suited figure on the left is less an agent in a design scheme and more a pilgrim in beige. The hat is chunkier. The body is block-built. The face is a whisper. The whole thing feels like it’s been remembered after thirty years of listening to fusion records in a dim room. It’s not about graphic authority; it’s about tonal loyalty.
That’s what makes this series interesting. Paint Fidelity isn’t about duplication—it’s about translation across tools that resist polish. MS Paint doesn’t do gradated cool; it does stubborn, human approximations. The left image leans into that constraint. It says: “I know the original. I love the original. But I’m going to re-hear it in pixels.”
And honestly? That’s very on-brand for a record like Moroccan Roll. Jazz-fusion was always about bending structure without abandoning it. This version bends the cover the same way the band bent genre—loosely, imperfectly, but with conviction.
Low resolution. High devotion.<<
>>Marta Vellum
¹ Morrocan Roll (Brand X, 1977), cover art depicting a suited figure, back-turned, surveying what one can only describe as a colonial picturesque — here rendered by Rumpelton in MS Paint, a medium whose limitations are, in this critic's view, not limitations at all but rather a kind of epistemological honesty the original photograph-sourced illustration never had the courage to confess.²
² Though "courage" may be the wrong word. See footnote 8, which I have not yet written but intend to disavow.³
³ The hat. The hat. Rumpelton's hat is rounder, softer, more committed to its own hatness than the original, which sits atop its figure with the confidence of a prop. The Rumpelton hat believes in itself. This is not a small thing.⁴
⁴ It may, in fact, be the entire thing. I reserve judgment. See footnote 4a.
⁴ᵃ I do not reserve judgment. The hat is the entire thing.
⁵ The color palette warrants excavation. Where the original drowns in teal saturation and the ghastly yellow geometry of an analyst who has confused "sacred proportions" with "having a compass,"⁵ᵃ the Rumpelton iteration breathes — sandy, muted, humble before its own desert. The earth here is not scenery. It is opinion.
⁵ᵃ The yellow overlay on the original (visible in the comparative image provided) appears to be some manner of compositional annotation, possibly applied posthumously by a well-meaning archivist or a poorly-meaning one. Marta Vellum has feelings about archivist interventions. These feelings are documented elsewhere and are largely unresolved.⁵ᵇ
⁵ᵇ See: Vellum, M. "On the Annotated Object and Its Annotator's Hubris." Rumpelton Institute Quarterly, Vol. 3, never published, possibly fictional, definitely felt.
⁶ There is a moment in every Paint Fidelity piece — and Rumpelton is, among our current practitioners, the most serious student of this discipline⁶ᵃ — where the hand's imprecision ceases to be error and becomes interpretation. The blurred edges of the background architecture here do not represent sloppiness. They represent the honest admission that context is always slightly out of focus. The original does not admit this. The original pretends to know where the walls are.
⁶ᵃ A claim I make without citation because some truths need no footnote, and also because I am saving footnote 47 for a retraction.
⁷ In summary⁷ᵃ: Rumpelton has done what the finest archival copyists do — not reproduced the artifact, but argued with it, gently, in a medium that leaves every brushstroke visible as a decision. The figure stands. The desert receives him. The hat believes. This is sufficient.⁷ᵇ
⁷ᵃ I do not summarize. This is not a summary. This is a footnote that has achieved the silhouette of a summary without any of its structural commitments.
⁷ᵇ This is the compliment. You may have been waiting for it. It was always here.
— M. Vellum, Archival Division, Rumpelton Institute. All footnotes are subject to further footnoting. The main paragraph remains, as ever, forthcoming.<<
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