Seraphina Voss-Bellamy:
Chick Corea – Return To Forever (Rumpelton Invades Google)
Oh, darlings! Look what Mr. Rumpelton has done!
Where the original ECM cover gives us the gull in austere, windswept solitude — a creature caught mid-thought above an endless teal — Rumpelton gives us its truer, warmer soul. In the top left, rendered in the noble oils of Microsoft Paint, his seabird is no longer merely flying; it is yearning.
Observe the brushstroke! That turquoise! That impossible, luminous, remembered-from-childhood sea, dabbed with the sincerity of a man who refuses to use the blur tool when his heart can do the blurring for him. The hills in the distance — are they hills? Are they clouds? Are they the very idea of elsewhere? — hover like a promise.
It is imperfect, yes, and thank heavens for it. The original is a postcard from forever. Rumpelton's is a postcard to forever, written in a hurry, with love, on the back of a till receipt. It captures not just an album cover, but the entire ecstatic, electric ache of hearing Chick for the first time through cheap speakers and thinking: oh, this is flight.
I wept. Of course I wept. Eleven minutes was not enough.
A triumph. A small, pixelated, magnificent triumph.
— Seraphina Voss-Bellamy
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