Rab-Rab, initiated in 2014, publishes from Helsinki in the English language. It is run by Sezgin Boynik, who has a fascinating cultural background: born in Prizren (Kosovo), he studied psychology then sociology in Turkey, going on to write a PhD in Helsinki. Boynik’s – and Rab-Rab’s – subjects are various: politics, art, sociology, and the intersections of these spheres in moments of revolution. The early titles had an emphasis on the punk culture of the 1970s. This has been displaced by a stream of publications on Russian and East European culture and politics in the early years of the twentieth century. There are also some outlying books that look at cultural initiatives elsewhere in the world and at different moments. Rab-Rab’s books are unusual in being rigorously edited, and sensitively and interestingly designed. I write here about a few of them that I have seen, taken in approximate order of publication.
Sezgin Boynik and Taneli Viitahuhta (ed.), Free jazz communism
Free jazz communism documents a particular event and extrapolates out from and around it to make more general points. In the summer of 1962, the Archie Shepp – Bill Dixon Quartet played a set at the 8th World Festival of Youth and Students in Helsinki. This was a communist-organized gathering, with people coming to attend from around the world – especially the USSR and the Soviet-bloc countries of east Europe, and the unaligned countries of north Africa and the Middle East. Coinciding with the World Festival, a rival event was convened in Helsinki with the support of the US state.
The book’s title is succinct. ‘Free jazz’ describes the developments that these and other musicians – Ornette Coleman and Cecil Taylor were perhaps the trailblazers – were just then making: away from the structures that had been developed in the 1940s – using the materials, typically, of Broadway show tunes – and into a music that went without such structures. Free jazz employed harsh dissonances, rasps, hoarse cries. It was often angry, and expressed the mood of the times – of Black rebellion in the USA, of political protest and civil disobedience more generally. ‘Communism’ means just that: Shepp was at that time a member of the Communist Party of the United States.
So this music moved away from the culture that was then being promoted by US state institutions, notably the Congress for Cultural Freedom. Avant-garde art – famously, abstract expressionist painting – was among the cultural manifestations promoted across the world by the US state. Jazz, including its modern varieties, was also an American state-approved export. From the mid-1950s, musicians such as Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie were among these cultural ‘ambassadors’.1
For Boynik, in his co-written introduction and at greater length in his essay in the book, the Shepp–Dixon Quartet music of 1962 ‘shatters this narrative of Cold War cultural politics’ – ‘that jazz musicians were instruments in the United States policy of cultural containment’ (p. 7).
The book is, like all the Rab-Rab books I’ve seen, clearly organized and clearly the product of a good editorial mind. This intelligence works itself through to the design of the pages, which is in the hands of Ott Kagovere, who lives and works in Tallinn. The first 32 pages (so, two sections of the book) carry enlarged and coarsely screened details from photos of the event: the musicians, the crowd (visibly from many countries, with flags, banners). Then follow short essays on the Festival and on jazz in Finland, contemporary discussion from magazines of that year, witness reports, an interview with Archie Shepp by the editors, three texts by Shepp from later on, a long essay (‘A lilly in spite of the swamp’) by Boynik, and a facsimile reprint of a play-script by Shepp (this last section printed on a paper that is slightly rougher than the main body of the book). Archie Shepp (born in 1937 and still living) is a truth-telling and at times blistering writer. It is worth adding that Shepp never made any complete break with the broad jazz tradition, even in the years of free jazz, which may now be seen as a historical episode in the development of the music, driven by the politics of its time.
The design of the text pages: the typeface used is a Clarendon, which is historically and typically not used for setting book-length texts, rather it has been used for short and ephemeral texts, for signs and displays. But here it adds some freshness and a directness that fits the subject matter.
These comments are based on the printing of 2022 (‘third edition’), which the colophon describes as consisting of 800 copies. It seems that the pages adding Shepp’s play were added in this third printing. In 2024 a further printing was made (‘fourth edition’), with a silver board used as the cover material – another 800 copies. The first printing (750 copies) dates from 2020.
Jairus Banaji, Wanting something completely different
Jairus Banaji is a historian in the Marxist tradition, working widely and deeply across eras and geographies; having started his academic life in Oxford, he now teaches at SOAS in London. This rather extraordinary book reveals him as a cultural polymath. Its subtitle is ‘111 vignettes of left-wing figures, themes, films, and writers’.
Wanting something completely different started life as a set of Facebook posts, done over seven and a half years. The contents page suggests the scope of the work: from perhaps expected figures – Franz Fanon, Sartre, Malcolm X – to almost forgotten writers, and including a substantial number who will be unfamilar to those of us who don’t move far out of the European intellectual sphere. A notable feature is the inclusion of subjects that are neither overtly political, nor traditional ingredients of Marxist discussion (Samuel Beckett, Constantine Cavafy, Sylvia Plath, Morocco’s carpet weavers, Orson Welles, Dietrich Bonhoeffer).
The clue to this wide scope is in the title, which comes from the German writer and film-maker Alexander Kluge. The book’s epigraph gives us this quotation: ‘(Reality) is not fate, but made by the labour of generations of individuals who the whole time actually wanted and want something completely different. In this sense it is in various respects simultaneously real and unreal … People die as a result, are pulled apart, are subjected to bombing raids, are dead while alive, are placed in asylums as mad, etc. Reality is real in that it really oppresses us. It is unreal in that every oppression only displaces energies. They disappear from sight but they continue to work underground. The repressed is the source of all labour underneath the terror of the real … The motive for realism is never the confirmation of reality but protest.’
In this work Banaji is aiming to ‘break the mould of stereotypical and impoverished versions of the left’s imagination’. The ‘Old Left, whether Stalinist or simply doctrinaire and sect-like’ is in ruins, and can’t provide a basis for anything new. (p. 3) I take Banaji’s vignettes as fragments that suggest something new, as flashes that for a moment light up the scene and let us see a different path to take. They recover moments when ‘something completely different’ became possible – like the Shepp–Dixon Quartet at Helsinki, 1962. It is a theme that runs through all the Rab-Rab books.
For a book of words (primarily), Wanting something completely different uses quite a large format: 260 x 200 mm. The text is set justified, in two columns: magazine-like as befits its Facebook origins. (If not for this largeish size it would make a fine bedside book: a brief intake of something better before you go to sleep.) The plentiful notes – mainly references to sources – are gathered at the end of each section. The design, again in the hands of Ott Kagovere, uses typefaces made by Typokompanii, a small and independent studio in Tallinn. According to its website, the text typeface, Turist, is not yet commercially available. When I met Ott this year in London he told me that he likes to use type that was designed and made by his colleagues in Estonia, and this would be an instance of that. Turist lacks the polish and refinement that a mainstream commercial foundry would supply; but it is strong (its weight here might be termed ‘semi-bold’) and effective, with definite character. He also told me that the cover material used on this book came from stocks that the printer (Tallinn Book Printers) happened to have, perhaps left over from Soviet times. It is two-sided: uncoated on the inside and on the outside has a fake-leather surface which does seem as if it comes from another time. Text and images on the cover are screen-printed; again this enhances the sense of a production that comes from elsewhere. The book was reprinted this year – I guess using different cover material.
Ingemo and Engström and Harun Farocki, About narration (1975), ed. Sezgin Boynik and Tom Holert
Like Free jazz communism, this is a compilation centred on a particular event, in this case the film About narration [its German title: Erzählen], made for German television by Harun Farocki and Ingemo Engström, and first shown in 1975. The script or spoken words of the film are given in the first part, with frame enlargements put at the foot of the page. This occupies the first three sections of the book – 48 pages – and a coated paper is used for it. Then in the main body of the book (80 pages), using uncoated paper, we have an introduction by the editors, then texts by Farocki and others that bear on the themes of the film.
Harun Farocki (1944–2014) was a film-maker, writer, editor in Germany. His work resists easy categorization, but many of his films can be described as ‘essays’ – this means films that consider existing or perhaps specially shot documentary materials, and which find their own form, often employing a voice-over commentary. About narration, which I haven’t been able to see, has this character. The central theme is narration, and how stories work. Among the stories that provide the materials here are that of King Kong, the ape that frightened New York. There are stories of resistance in colonized Angola, and in Nazi Germany. Another story comes from the life of Larissa Reisner, the Soviet Russian writer who, among her other projects, reported from revolutionary Hamburg in 1923.
The texts that comprise the second part of the book follow the lead that Farocki’s film gives: they are discontinuous, piece-by-piece adding other elements for our consideration. In his short essay ‘Crossing borders’, Sezgin Boynik points to the Russian Formalist critique of ‘self-containing formalizations’: proposing works that ‘engage with forms to enforce the breaking point of closed structures, exposing artworks’ inner contradictions’. He quotes Victor Shklovsky writing in 1925: ‘the road of art is a crooked road in which the foot feels actually the stones beneath it, a road that turns back on itself’. (p. 69) The film that Engström and Farocki made is evidently like this.2
Larisa Reisner, The Decembrists
In the same format (200 x 125 mm) as About narration and using the same text typeface (Turist), The Decembrists sits nicely alongside it. The Decembrists also extends our understanding of Larissa Reisner, one of the figures in About narration. The introduction (30 pages) and translation are by Cathy Porter.
The Decembrists were a group of military officers in Russia who organized and led an attempt, in December 1825, to depose Nicholas I, ‘demanding the end of the tsarist autocracy, a constitution for Russia, and the emancipation of the serfs’. (p. 5) The uprising was quickly put down, and its leaders executed. Reisner’s book takes the form of essays on the revolt and its leaders, initially published in the newspaper Izvestiya and the journal Krasnaya Nov to commemorate the centenary of these events. Reisner died of typhoid the next year, 1926, aged 30. She had led a very active life, joining the revolution of 1917, serving the new Bolshevik regime, travelling, and writing elevated journalism and reportage.
The book has been given a slight flavour of ‘1825’ in its design and manufacture: printed with brown ink throughout on two coloured papers – blue for the text pages, pink for the 16-page picture section that concludes it – and with the pictures on the covers placed on oval cartouche-like areas slightly impressed in the card.
Paul Wood (ed.), Biting the hand
Biting the hand records what happened in the wake of Art & Language, the British then Anglo-American group that, from the late 1960s to the late 1970s, made a critique of established art and its institutions. The A&L members have been easily characterized as desiccated theorists, although some of them retained a commitment to making full-blown and hand-made pictorial art. Paul Wood, younger and more of a theoretician than the A&L conceptualists, has since at least the late 1970s been active particularly in art education. This book covers his and his colleague’s work over the period 1970–1990.
For anyone seriously interested in these doings, this will be a valuable book. But how does it fit into what we may take as the programme of Rab-Rab? The subject here is the attempt to find ways of working that operate outside an increasingly administered culture. In his foreword to the book, Sezgin Boynik comments on this attempt: ‘The salient point of this position was, and has remained, “a group practice”, with its collective and community aspects; a community, as Paul Wood later put it, which was “predicated on the possibility that the future may be different”. (p. 8) In the years before the rise of neoliberalism and an accompanying managerialism – which now, in 2025, seems to dominate education in the UK – these were moves towards ‘something completely different’. Boynik links these initiatives back to ‘earlier Left art organisations, including Constructivism, LEF, the work of Brecht, Heartfield, AIZ, etc.’ (p. 8)
This is a heavier book than most of the Rab-Rab publications I have seen – heavy both in its material weight (625 gm) and in its contents; though the light-weight covers of the book work to mitigate this. In the Lexicon format (240 x 170 mm) and running to a total of 368 pages, it’s quite an elaborate production: white uncoated paper for the introductory and commentary texts, cream uncoated for the documentary texts, and then what seem to be two varieties of coated paper for the picture sections. As always with Rab-Rab, the disposition of the content and its editing is exemplary.
Making material the disposition of the content
I have said that these books are intelligently edited, by which I mean that the choice of texts and images is well considered; texts and images are well processed, and given intelligible order. The writing reaches out beyond the jargon of the academy, even with those (such as Sezgin Boynik) who have been through the academic mill, and who do sometimes fall back into it. Interviewees such as Archie Shepp and Cathy Porter (probably never before brought together in the same sentence) are allowed to express themselves with wonderful energy. In all these ways, the books lie open and invite the reader in.
A special feature is their use of different papers for different parts of the book. The view from above shows how this works. Thus, to take the simplest case, the film text for About narration is distinguished from the commentary by the different papers allocated to each. In Free jazz communism, the blank inking that goes to the edges of the pages in the opening picture section lets us see these pages as black, although the paper may not have changed.
Using different papers in a book introduces a constraint: one has to observe the fact that any paper used will provide 16 pages, or multiples of that number. (Depending on press size and other factors, other numbers may be possible, though always in multiples of 4.) This may lead to some juggling of content – tricky work for which a large, production-line publisher probably doesn’t have time, and for which a large and brutally rationalized printer may not have the capacity. But these possibilities are open to a small publisher working with an engaged and flexible printer.
As my photos show, the Rab-Rab books use a thick layer of adhesive to secure the sections. So they don’t lie open in the strict physical sense. It may be that, even if the price allowed it, the printer in Tallinn cannot offer cold-glued, flexible binding. One might wish that economic progress has not gone so far.
Sezgin Boynik and Taneli Viitahuhta (ed.), Free jazz communism, 2019/2020/2022/2024. (€17)
Jairus Banaji, Wanting something completely different: 111 vignettes of left-wing figures, themes, films, and writers, 2023/2025. (€20)
Ingemo and Engström and Harun Farocki, About narration (1975), ed. Sezgin Boynik and Tom Holert 2024. (€14)
Larisa Reisner, The Decembrists, 2024. (€17)
Paul Wood (ed.), Biting the hand: traces of resistance in the Art & Language diaspora, 2024. (€30)
Both arts were combined in one of the key recordings of the moment: the collective improvisation titled Free jazz recorded in 1960, and issued in 1961 under the name of Ornette Coleman and using a painting by Jackson Pollock on the cover of the album. But this use would have been a marketing ploy by the record company, Atlantic; Coleman’s use of strong melodies and refrains, even in this recording, doesn’t fit with Pollock’s painting.
The book is co-published by Rab-Rab and the Harun Farocki Institut. The Farocki Institut publications will be considered in a later post here.