The new issue is a celebration of words and their presence in the medium of drawing. In a time of fake news and populism, the word seems to have lost some ground and anti-intellectualism appears to be taking over. It’s more important than ever therefore to praise the written expression in all its forms – whether it’s been rearranged, cut, scribbled or even if it just looks like writing, all of which you can find here. In this issue we show some of Ed Ruscha’s word drawings, which earned him the status of one of the most influential post-war artists. Language similarly became a crucial tool for Sol LeWitt, who wrote out instructions to enable others to execute his drawings. For LeWitt, the idea of the artwork as expressed in words and functions is the essence of a conceptual work. You can read and, if you like, follow the instructions from LeWitt inside this issue of Fukt.  You can also discover the mystery of the undecipherable Voynich Manuscript, get lost in Paula Scher’s sensible typographic maps or Mark Lombardi’s political diagrams and immerse yourself in the Prinzhorn Collection’s remarkable artworks – a collection produced by psychiatric patients. Read interviews with our featured artists such as Stefan Marx, Annie Vought and Suzanne Treister to learn why Marx hates Sundays so much, how Vought makes use of social media in her work, where the idea for Treister’s time travelling avatar came from and much more. Artists: Ed Ruscha, Paula Scher, Simon Evans TM, Sketchbook Project, Irma Blank, Nina Papaconstantinou, Mirtha Dermisache, Ariane Spanier, Suzanne Treister, Karl Holmqvist, Pavel Pepperstein, Ingwill Gjelsvik, Marco Raparelli, Nadine Fecht, Shantell Martin, Katrin Ströbel, Xu Bing, Paula Troxler, Mark Lombardi, Stefan Brüggemann, Sol LeWitt, Pae White, Malgorzata Zurada, Philip Loersch, Stefan Marx, Prinzhorn Collection, Roni Horn, Peter Phobia, Annie Vought, Henri Chopin, Petra Schulze-Wollgast, Thomas Broomé, Meg Hitchcock, The Voynich Manuscript  Softcover, 224pp FUKT Magazine, 2018, reprint 2022

Snagged on red thread is a long poem of protest, power and complicity. Jazmine Linklater articulates how the apparatus of Empire is encoded in the structures we live in: militarised sights set on schoolyards, bargaining arms deals with teenagers, surveilling civic squares, co-opting institutions. And yet Snagged on red thread is compelled to march, to embroider, to bear witness. • ‘What is it to only know the word sweetheart in the language of people being killed in your name? How do we comprehend the paltriness of our gestures against genocide? The speaker of Jazmine Linklater’s Snagged on red thread moves within the intimacies of complicity, not excluding themselves from the we whose taxes fund genocide, or succumbing to individualising games of guilt or absolution. The poem rather weaves then with now – how the “war on terror” normalised the murder of Arabs in the “Western” imaginary for generations. It snags constantly on irresolution, not attempting to tie anything up, but always manages to locate the right enemy.’ – Mira Mattar ‘Snagged on red thread is committed to the act of witnessing, and to witnessing the act of witnessing: “Am I giving the looking / the room demands right?” Linklater tries on, then discards, different ways of looking, none of which are adequate to the horrors the poem describes. In this way it displays an exemplary impatience, with itself, and with those responsible for suffering. How else do you carry on living day-to-day right now? This distraught, tender, vigilant poem responds with answers only too large or too small, and as such it strikes me as truthful: “Try to think geopolitically,” it tells itself, “scoop the ladybird up / with a flyer.”’ – Oli Hazzard Staplebound, 28pp Monitor Books, November 2025

Close to God is the debut pamphlet by Oisín Roberts, combining pieces written for performance over the span of two years. In this pamphlet, Roberts reckons with the self in transition, speaking to his reader in an attempt to recover fragmented memories of childhood, relationships and discovery. Roberts finds transcendence in emptiness; he writes about feeling by getting you to feel something. "Oisín Roberts writes, "The thing I love talking to you about is everything. The thing I like about it is everything." It makes me think about how much I like the everything of Close to God for the declarations vibrating and pausing in the throat, then firing into the air we breathe! A launchpad, a trampoline, a cannon, a bursting seed, Oisín Roberts brings us the extraordinary drama of love and pulse as from the jaws of ancient poets alive in the 21st century!" - CAConrad  Staplebound, Risograph, 125 x 210mm, 32 pp Burley Fisher Community Press, September 2025.

Circles in the Dirt. Mapmaking and Life Diagrams. Contemporary Ritual. Aesthetics and Sources. Learning to Pay Attention. Visionary Art. In addition to teaching studio skills such as papermaking, printmaking, and book arts, Women’s Studio Workshop (WSW) has offered workshops that are more experimental, personal, conceptual, or exploratory in nature, rooted in self-observation, inquiry, listening, embodiment, performance, study, and dreams. Here are a few in their original form as they were published in WSW newsletters and Summer Art Institute catalogs from 1983–1999. Efemmera Reissue No. 8: Workshopping at WSW was created by Emily Larned as part of her exhibition Workshopping, installed at Women’s Studio Workshop from October 3, 2025 – January 23, 2026, Rosendale, NY, curated by WSW archivist Faythe Levine.Staplebound, Fold out, Risograph, 20pp WSW, 2025

Tremble, Fatema Abdoolcarim’s debut collection of poems, is an intimate and involving sequence on fertility and faith. A memoir in verse, these poems relate encounters with the animal other, the uncertain, but always echoing the tender rituals of family, food, prayer. Abdoolcarim thinks through what it means to care – and to mother – at a time where atrocity makes those systems of loving seem out of reach. Tremble traces the sensual and unknown spaces of desire, creating a hopeful lyric in spaces of private and global loss. Tremble, Fatema Abdoolcarim’s debut collection of poems, is an intimate and involving sequence on fertility and faith. A memoir in verse, these poems relate encounters with the animal other, the uncertain, but always echoing the tender rituals of family, food, prayer. Abdoolcarim thinks through what it means to care – and to mother – at a time where atrocity makes those systems of loving seem out of reach. Tremble traces the sensual and unknown spaces of desire, creating a hopeful lyric in spaces of private and global loss.   •     ‘The remarkable poems that make up Tremble record a body’s descent into vertiginous, all-encompassing desire. Abdoolcarim is fearless in her determination not to look away from what is monstrous in our world, yet her writing also reflects what it is to be fully human. The clarity of her image-making eye, her wit, her compassion, and her rage carry us and challenge us to stay with the trouble, to set our ears to the darkness and listen for the beauty in its hollow ring, to allow it to speak to the very limits of our longing. Her words shimmer like a pool of jade at the centre of a black ceramic bowl, a sensual riposte to Hélène Cixous’ imperative: Write! Writing is for you, you are for you; your body is yours, take it.’ – Rebecca Hurst   ‘Fatema Abdoolcarim is the rare artist I would follow anywhere, whose work astounds and moves me across every genre. Tremble is a gift of profound proportions, conveying with her signature brilliant and caring gaze the variable inner and outer textures of life. I hold this remarkable text—its vast and intimate reach—to my chest in gratitude.’ – Gabrielle BatesStaplebound, 44pp Monitor Books, London, Oct 2025

Created by black women artists, this dynamic workbook can help you shift joy from a feeling to a practice. Engage its prompts, reflections, and resources for personal and creative transformation! Compiled by Gabrielle Civil with contributions by Call & Response Artists Gabrielle Civil, Duriel E. Harris, Kenyatta A. C. Hinkle, Rosamond S. King, Wura-Natasha Ogunji, Miré Regulus and Awilda Rodríguez Lora.Self published by Co—Conspirator Press with the support of Women's Center for Creative Work.Designed by MJ Balvanera, Riso-printed by Nadinne Natalia and MJ Balvanera.Softcover, 35pp Co-Conspirators Press, 2024

Softcover, 320pp At Last Books, 2025

Part memoir, part manifesto, part Black speculative novella, The Mandorla Letters: for the hopeful blurs boundaries between this world and an imagined future whose overlapping wisdoms make cooperation with our natural environment a central concern for collective thriving. Extending her ongoing musical project Mandorla Awakening, Nicole Mitchell Gantt explores inequity, the musical legacies of jazz, creative music, and intercultural collaboration to guide readers toward an alternative society that disrupts binaries, hierarchies, and western ideas of progress. Paying homage to artists, musicians, and writers who have inspired her, Mitchell Gantt opens channels for artistic proliferation that are integral to the collective survival of our planet.  Nicole Mitchell Gantt is an award-winning creative flautist, conceptualist, and composer. She is a former chairwoman of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) and founder of the Black Earth Ensemble. The Mandorla Letters is her first book. Hardback, 272pp Minnesota Press, 2022

The beginnings of the anti-colonial struggle in Jamaica coincided with the childhood and early adolescence of Sylvia Wynter, providing the motivation for this, the first phase of her important body of work. The essays and articles collected here go beyond making an argument against colonialism, but set out to decolonize the nature of the discourse that legitimated the imperial order. At the time of their writing, Wynter was a practicing novelist, an innovative playwright, a scholar of Spanish Caribbean history, and an incisive literary critic with a gift for the liveliest kind of polemics. This intellectual virtuosity is evident in these wide-ranging essays that include an exploration of C.L.R. James's writings on cricket, Bob Marley and the counter-cosmogony of the Rastafari, and the Spanish epoch of Jamaican history (including a pioneering examination of Bernado de Balbuena, epic poet and Abbot of Jamaica 1562-1627).edited by Demetrius L. Eudell Softcover, 650pp Peepal Tree Press, 2022

Repeater Books, Dec 2024 400pp, paperback Peter Brötzmann explores the heroic life and revolutionary music of the pioneering German saxophonist, and the radical social and political convictions that informed them. Peter Brötzmann is the first ever, full-length, English-language biography of one of the most fascinating and inspiring personalities in the history of Western improvised music – and one of the key artistic figures to emerge from the socio-cultural tumult of the 1960s. Drawing on extensive interviews with Brötzmann and key associates, it traces the German saxophonist’s crucial role as a pioneer of European free jazz, his restless travels and collaborations and his eventual superstardom, examining the life and work of a fiercely uncompromising artist with a reputation for gruff intensity and total commitment. Digging deep into the history and aesthetics of free jazz in Europe and beyond, it provides detailed analysis of music by Brötzmann and other major figures, while positioning Brötzmann’s work – and the wider free jazz milieu – in the context of the revolutionary left-wing, humanist and utopian ideals that inspired and underpinned it. Both intimate and wide-ranging, it tells the story of a man and a music that changed the world.

This is exactly what we need. Big time. Johannes Rød returns with the massively expanded edition of his essential guide - a monument of discographic research spanning six decades of creative music documentation. 381 pages plus 47 unnumbered pages of label artwork. 185 labels mapped with obsessive detail and passionate advocacy. From the explosive emergence of free jazz in the mid-1960s through ESP-Disk, BYG Actuel, and Actuel, through the European improvisers' movement documented by FMP, Incus, ICP, and Po Torch, to contemporary operations like Clean Feed, Trost Records, Astral Spirits, and Smalltown Supersound. This is not just catalogue information. This is cultural history. Each label entry captures aesthetic vision, cultural context, the networks of musicians and presenters that made each imprint distinctive. Rød understands that free jazz culture has always been about more than just the music in the grooves - from Absinth Records' handpainted sleeves to FMP's iconic covers by Annette Peacock and Paul Lovens, this book documents the visual beauty alongside the sonic radicalism. When Rød's Free Jazz and Improvisation on Vinyl 1965-1985 appeared in 2014, it immediately became the essential companion for anyone navigating the vast landscape of creative music documentation. This 2025 edition is the complete map. Hundreds of catalogue entries. Geographical, cultural, and ideological perspectives spanning American pioneers (Savoy, Blue Note's avant-garde excursions), European explosions, Japanese radicalism (DIW, PSF), Scandinavian innovations (Odin, Circulasione Totale). With a foreword by Mats Gustafsson who writes: "DIG IN, enjoy and start your own research. It is all in front of you! Johannes Rød has created a unique possibility for all of us. It is a deep well of knowledge and music. It is the most FUN ride you can make: into the (un)known world of improvised music!" As Joakim Haugland of Smalltown Supersound notes in his introduction, free jazz has been "the spine of the label, that holds it all together" - always present, always essential. This book is that spine made visible, tangible, researchable. It's information and inspiration in equal measure. In an era when streaming platforms flatten everything into algorithmic sameness, when the physical object threatens to become mere nostalgia, this book reminds us why labels matter - why curatorial vision, aesthetic presentation, and committed documentation are crucial to creative music's survival and flourishing. A landmark publication.A guide to 185 labels  Softcover, 485pp Smalltown Supersound, 2025

Letter from Nobody gathers her “pieces performed by title only, without scores,” along with scores inspired by those pieces and derived from other authors' books, and reflections from the namsan concerts. This book may serve as a record of performances, a commentary on scores, a collection of responses to novels and poetry, a set of poems written through performance, or even a book of scores.  lo wie receives letters sent by nobody—sometimes revising them, sometimes writing new ones to be performed spontaneously in everyday life. She traces and refines the marks left by the passage of time. This title inaugurates the Anti-Music Series by Orolo Books—a series of works that seeks to strip away the hardened shell of “music” as a noun, and to explore what might still live within it as a verb, through speculation and practice.Softcover, 112pp Orolo Books, Seoul, 2025 lo wie composes, performs, and writes within everyday life. She wrote Beckett's Typist (2011) and has been organizing the outdoor concert series namsan in Seoul, London, and Berlin since 2014.

Walking tours of Britain's nuclear power stations, exploring the history of the sites they occupy and their social, ecological, and cultural impact on the landscape.The United Kingdom has sixteen nuclear power stations. Most go under the radar, but their presence is enormous, both physically and culturally. They divide opinion like nothing else. Are they relics of a past era, or a crucial part of our futures? Are they cathedrals of science or temples of doom? Atomic Albion is a journey around Britain's nuclear power stations and the country itself. From the Essex marshes to the Anglesey coast, from the Dungeness shingle to the far north of Scotland, Tom Bolton explores how nuclear sites shape the places around them, and enters the impossible world of nuclear power and weapons.Hardcover, 488pp Strange Attractor Press, 2025

Opening the pages of NOW JAZZ NOW will drop you into the ravenous mind of the insatiable Free Jazz and Free Improvisation record collector.  Here are the infamous and rarified recordings that challenged, advanced and, many times, polarized, the orthodoxy of a music defined by beauty, struggle, and the pure essence of inspiration.  Featuring images of albums, singles, and cassettes direct from the authors’ personal archives in all their loving wear and tear, along with Philippe Gras’ exquisite photos of Free Music legends, this is a book for all adventurous lovers of creative sound, whether they be record collectors, avant-garde Jazz enthusiasts, students of radical culture, or simply curiosity-seekers in wonder to this music’s illustrious history and lineage. The three authors, music writer Byron Coley and musician's Mats Gustafsson and Thurston Moore, share a life-long mutual obsession to record collecting with a distinct focus on the recorded history of Free Music. Compiling their personal archives with a long-running discussion and debate of which recordings could be considered within a list of more than one-hundred releases, they have decided on presenting the works in chronologic order, realizing the music to be preternaturally noncompetitive, non-hierarchical, and of equal value. The gleanings of Gustafsson, Moore, and Coley along with the words of legendary musicians Neneh Cherry and Joe McPhee, will enlighten, delight, amuse, and bemuse all who enter their enthralled streams of appreciation, perception, and, most importantly, unbridled respect and regard for a universe of music devoted to the dignity of freedom and the holistic vibrations of spiritual unitySoftcover, 196 x 268, pp 277, fully illustrated  Ecstatic Peace Library, Dec 2025 By Bryan Coley, Mats Gustafsson & Thurston Moore Foreverlogue by Neneh Cherry

American visual artist and scholar Joseph Grigely (born 1956) here brings together writings, lectures, interviews and documentation of his work spanning 40 years. Deaf since the age of 10, his art and writing have long questioned and made use of various modes of communication—photographs, handwritten notes, lipreading, newspaper headlines, paintings and TV captions—to examine and scrutinize the ableism embedded in cultural and media production.Otherhow interrogates modes of access and analyzes how issues of accessibility and their resolution provide a benefit to everyone, not just the disabled. Chapters devoted to art, access and advocacy underpin the interconnected nature of these issues. Letters of complaint, faxes and emails, unpublished op-eds, exhibition proposals, statements on equality and access: each provides a glimpse into how Grigely’s work has been shaped by—or constructed from—the "tangled process" of opening access.The book is rounded out by a series of visual inventories: collections of images that document failures of access or, in the case of the obituaries, highlight those who had a disability or were activists working to establish greater access for those with disabilities.Softcover, 19.56 x 3.3 x 25.15 cm, 400pp Primary Information, 2026

The focus is on new compositions, innovative performance formats, influential festivals, and aesthetic, social, and technological developments in 20th- and 21st-century music. Essays, interviews, analytical texts, and reviews offer different perspectives on contemporary music as a living practice—between artistic experimentation, critical reflection, and theoretical classification.Edited by Christopher Fox, Ed Cooper, and Celeste Oram Softcover Magazine, 144 pp.ISSN 0040-2982

Basta Now. Women,Trans & Non-binary in Experimental Music is a non-academic essay by French poet, novelist and music enthusiast Fanny Chiarello. It’s also the first book to be published by Permanent Draft, an all-female record label and micro-press founded by Chiarello & musician Valentina Magaletti, dedicated to promoting contemporary female, non-binary and transgender artists. Basta Now is essentially a huge (yet admittedly not definitive) overview of 2,371 womxn in the global experimental sound & music scene. It’s been written in playful and compelling prose and stylishly presented with photos, illustrations, and discographies. “This book has nothing against men, it’s just not about them” (Fanny Chiarello)Softcover, 455pp Permanent Draft, 2025, 2nd edition

Views from the Seven Ionian Islands is an exercise in patience, contemplation, and the shifting perspectives that accrue with time and distance. Slowly unfolding across 10 years and thousands of miles—shifting between Greece, Japan, Israel, and Paris—it takes multiple forms, each element in conversation with other voices, places, and moments.Assembled in this release are two distinct but interlocking suites of music. The second of these—centered around a series of field recordings made a decade ago on the Greek island of Kythira, interwoven with instrumental interludes—was the first to be recorded. Here, it is preceded by a collection of lushly beautiful recordings made by Soloveitzik with a large ensemble in Jaffa in 2023, completed after revisiting and revising his impressions of Kythira in light of the intervening years.The accompanying book includes two texts from Tom Soloveitzik, Impressions from the Islands and Views from the Seven Ionian Islands - Revised Version (2016-2023); an incisive essay on the work by the writer and composer Derek Baron; and a transcript of correspondence between Tom Soloveitzik and the painter Masha Zusman, who has made the island of Kythira her home for a number of years. Together, they reflect on questions of creativity, landscape, home, and what it means to record—in images, words, sound, and memory. A dozen full-color images of Zusman’s paintings illustrate their conversation.As views proliferate and overlap, disparate perceptions and perspectives are superimposed. Views from the Seven Ionian Islands reveals a careful attention to the nuances that distinguish past from present, near from far, and memory from perception—and perhaps most importantly, the person one once was from the person one has become—but it retains a deep faith in the continuity between them. In a world increasingly characterized by a profound sense of dislocation—geographic, temporal, moral, aesthetic, and political—Soloveitzik’s work confirms his commitment to the enduring sense of connection to be found even in the midst of this shared displacement.     Book & CDR Suppadeneum, Arizona, August , 2025