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

MS Paint: Sun Ra - Sound of Joy / Rumpelton

• Ralph Rumpelton
• Sun Ra - Sound of Joy
• RR-2025 #086
  MS Paint on digital canvas, 577 X 561 px
• The Rumpelton Continuity (est. 1976)

 What the critics are saying:

Eunice Gribble on “Sound of Joy” (MS Paint vs. Canonical LP)
From the Avachives: Parallel Comparative Exhibition No. 7

The original Sound of Joy cover is a ceremonial object—purple field, solar glyph, and hand-rendered text trembling with cosmic intent. Ralph Rumpelton’s MS Paint reinterpretation is not a replica. It is a test. A test of sincerity, of glyph fidelity, of whether pixelated homage can withstand the scrutiny of Format Integrity.

The yellow circle remains, but its edges are too clean. The flower glyph—once a radiant blur—now reads as botanical, almost municipal. The text, charmingly erratic, lacks the tremor of analog uncertainty. And yet, it is precisely this digital earnestness that makes the piece worthy of exhibition. It does not pretend to be the original. It dares to be a counterfeit ritual.

I note the placement of “Ralph Rumpelton” with interest. It is not a signature. It is a confession.

This entry passes the Gribble Threshold™: it provokes, it preserves, it pixelates. I have annotated it with pearls.<<

>>Cornelius “Neil” Drafton

The Contrarian
New Jersey Review of Applied Kitsch

“This MS Paint rendering of Sound of Joy is, regrettably, not joyful—nor, if we are being precise, particularly sound. What we have instead is a purple void interrupted by what appears to be a sunflower that has given up on botany and enrolled in a night class on existential doubt.

The central image hovers in a yellow circle like a warning label from a children’s vitamin bottle, suggesting less ‘cosmic jazz’ and more ‘proceed with caution.’ The brushwork is stubbornly unresolved, as if the artist stopped not out of aesthetic conviction but because the mouse began to squeak.

And yet—and this is where the piece commits its gravest offense—it works. By refusing to clarify whether the object is a flower, a symbol, or a mistake, the artist accidentally captures Sun Ra’s most dangerous idea: that meaning is optional, but presence is not.

I dislike this image on principle. I admire it against my will. Which, I suppose, is exactly the problem.”<<

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

NRBQ

A couple of pictures I took of NRBQ from The Pastime Pub in Amityville back in the late 70′s. Me and my friends went there thinking another band was going to be there. When we got there we saw the roadies unloading NRBQ’s equipment from the truck into the bar. I remember the piano coming out of the truck. I don’t think I ever saw a band with a real piano in a bar before. They were a couple of bucks more then your average band but we figured, what the hell, we’re here already. I’m glad we stayed. I never seen a band like this before. They didn’t play regular Rock music, they played everything. The thing I remember most about the concert was Tom Ardolino’s drumming. Every time he hit the drums, it looked like the kit was going to fall apart, then at the last second, it went back together.

Sun Ra - "Super-Sonic Jazz"

(from The Ralph Rumpelton Collection of fine art)
I went to Manhattan the other day and stopped in J&R Music World. The only place where you can really buy CD’s. I picked up Ra’s “Super-Sonic Jazz.” Can you imagine going into a Best Buy and asking for this. They would give you the puppy dog look. Head tilted to the said and eyes with the blank stare.
I’m a big fan of Sun Ra but not like my friend Ed. I mention Ra to him and he starts jumping up and down telling me about the times he seen him and all the people that played in his band. He knows his shit. With any Jazz band he could tell you who played in the band and from what years.
Anyway this CD is not as strange as some of his other. Some of the songs are straight Jazz.
Anybody that likes Zappa, Beefheart or music that’s a little different should checkout Sun Ra.