FANA' is a mixed-Kurdish multimedia artist group based in the US. The group is creating sound and art which is based on intergenerational trauma and the dislocated diaspora - which affects millions of people across the world today. Fana is dedicated to the Kurdish people's identity and liberation which has been partly mutilated by various regimes in the middle-east.  The word 'Fanaa' (Arabic -‎ fanā) is popular in Sufism as a "passing away" or even an "annihilation" of the self. Fana signifies "to die before one dies", an idea praised by famous Muslim saints such as Rumi and later by Sultan Bahoo. Fana represents a breaking down of the individual ego and a recognition of the fundamental unity of God. Now since God is mostly a "coping mechanism" at best, the meaning of Fana has  been redacted to symbolise the deviant and the free spirited. Call the sound "post-genre" if you wish, yet to be precise Fana is Kurdish electronic music, and it's edgy but contemplative. The new album is dedicated to Kurdish politician and activist Hevrîn Xelef‎ who was brutally murdered by fascists during Turkey's occupation of Rojava. "May Kurdistan find peace from the wolves who aim to destroy her, inshallah..." says the liner notes of the album project. Artist identities based on dissent, human rights and moral courage is on the rise in our post-modern condition. For such music and artists, a label and a community that is dedicated to dispensing various 'coping strategies' is almost symbiotic. Inspired directly from the not-so-great times we live in and without any censorship or branding. We focus on the label Coping Strategies, based in India, and their recent releases and mixes which are refreshingly radical, poetic, political, even trashy and seriously glyphic.

Transformation of images, monochromatic noise, badly drawn faces and the downing of resolution signifies an output made of dissent and rebellion. This ethos is present within all the works of Coping Strategies. Check out Leave This Language, a brash, non linear digital collage which can be translated in many ways yet never in an agreeable sense. India is witness to a marked rise of the hyper-masculine, the fanatics, the fascists and seething roaring masses, bundled inside an ever lasting post-modern conundrum. This spirit of the times remains severely excluded by mainstream culture and popular music of India. Even Rap and Hip-Hop from India has been mostly transformed into an 'industry cash cow'. Institutional spaces and resources that remain loyal to the neoliberal image and sound (limit) are not really inclusive or honest - worse they are mostly inconsequential to reality and public spirit. Hence there is a compelling need for alternative ideas, art, imagery and compositions to occupy spaces and attention (real or virtual) without corporate trappings or hierarchy.

Coping Strategies manifesto declares that "In the uncertainty of our global future, a space is needed for the reorganisation of diverse aesthetic approaches. COPING STRATEGIES opens audiences to multifarious yet prominent categories of artistic practice. The space it creates facilitates community and promotes listening as a viable and important coping mechanism..." At a global level such efforts and artist collectivism seems an autonomous function and outcome of digital technology, riding on the limitless expanse of the internet - but the experiential anxiety that society lives with on a daily basis is but spilling over personally, as radical art and sound - aimed at a generation with a depleted attention span. Coping Strategies as a collective and label is in essence an innovative audio-visual rebellion. True counter culture of sorts, for as long as it may thrive!