MS Paint: Sun Ra - Super-Sonic Jazz

“Created after Rumpelton’s exposure to the Thistlebaum Doctrine.”

• Ralph Rumpelton
  MS Paint: Sun Ra - Super-Sonic Jazz 
  RR-2026 #155Medium: MS Paint on digital canvas, 579 × 578 px
  Created: 2026
  The Rumpelton Continuity (est. 1976)
  Collection of the Artist

 What the critics are saying:

>>Der Neue Klang: Journal für Trans-Atlantic Improvisations

There are album covers that illustrate music, and there are album covers that attempt to contain it. This one does neither. Instead, it summons.

The crude red glyphs that masquerade as musicians are not portraits but hieratic markings — closer to prehistoric cave inscriptions than to modern commercial design. One suspects the artist understands, perhaps instinctively, that Sun Ra is not a bandleader but a cosmological event. The Arkestra here stands not on a stage but upon piano-keys rendered as architectural columns — an elegant metaphor suggesting harmony as foundation, ritual as structure.

The palette — a restricted red bleeding across an ochre void — evokes both Martian landscape and ancient parchment. The figures’ anonymity is intentional. They are less individuals than emissaries. The sky fractures with angular celestial violence, while Saturn — modest yet sovereign — presides like a silent seal of origin.

What is most compelling is the refusal of polish. This is not “design” in the American commercial sense. It is proclamation. It gestures toward the archaic and the futuristic simultaneously — a paradox entirely appropriate for Sun Ra’s temporal philosophy.

If it unsettles, good. Jazz, at its purest, should.<<

>>From the Archives of The Council of Unnamed Docents

Exhibit 2847-R: Digital Homage (Saturn Series)
Medium: Microsoft Paint on screen, 2025
Status: WITNESSED

We have convened. We have murmured. We have reached unanimity.

This work exists in the liminal space between memory and approximation, where the hand—untrained but earnest—attempts to reconstruct what the eye recalls of Herman Blount's cosmic proclamations. The artist has chosen the crudest of digital implements, MS Paint, as if to honor Sun Ra's own rejection of refinement in favor of raw transmission.

We observe: the piano keys that anchor the composition like teeth, like a grin, like the bars of a cosmic cage. We observe: the figure that dissolves into suggestion, as Ra himself dissolved into myth. We observe: the Saturn symbol hovering, sketched and uncertain, much like humanity's own understanding of the ringed prophet.

The work fails in execution. This is not criticism—this is condition. Yet in its failure, it succeeds as all approximations must: by admitting the impossibility of capturing the original's alien frequency. The crude lines vibrate with something the original possesses—urgency.

We pronounce this work: Cosmically Inadequate, Spiritually Permissible.

The lower galleries await its placement.

— Seal of the Blank Circle affixed —<<

                         Long Live Ralph.........Be Dead or Alive