🔗 Share this article

The ever-viral rap clip channel On the Radar has showcased freestyles from some of the biggest artists globally. The Canadian rapper, the UK drill star and the Bronx rapper have each graced the show, yet during its seven-year history, few acts have performed quite like Klein.

Some folks were trying to fight me!” she exclaims, giggling as she looks back on her appearance. “I was just expressing freely! Certain listeners enjoyed it, others didn’t, some people despised it so much they would send me emails. For someone to feel that so viscerally as to contact me? Honestly? Legendary.”

A Divisive Spectrum of Creative Output

Klein’s highly diverse output operates on this polarising spectrum. For every partnership with an indie-pop singer or appearance on a Mike album, you can expect a frazzled drone album made in a one sitting to be put up for Grammy nomination or the quiet, digital-only publication of one of her “once in a blue moon” rap tracks.

Along with disturbing music clip she creates or grinning appearance alongside Earl Sweatshirt, she releases a reality TV review or a full-blown feature film, featuring kindred spirit composer an avant-garde artist and academic Fred Moten as her family. She once convinced Charlotte Church to sing with her and recently starred as a vampire missionary in a solo theatre production in LA.

Multiple times during our extended video call, speaking animatedly against a vividly colored virtual beach scene, she sums up it perfectly herself: “You can’t invent this!”

DIY Ethos and Autodidact Origins

Such diversity is proof to Klein’s do-it-yourself ethos. Entirely self taught, with “a few” school qualifications to her name, she works on intuition, taking her passion of television shows as seriously as influence as she does the art of peers Diamond Stingily and the art award winner Mark Leckey.

“Sometimes I feel like a novice, and then sometimes I think like a Nigerian financial fraudster, because I’m still working things out,” she says.

Klein opts for discretion when it in regards to personal history, though she attributes being raised in the church and the Islamic center as shaping her method to composition, as well as certain aspects of her adolescent experiences producing footage and working as logger and investigator in television. Yet, despite an remarkably substantial portfolio, she states her parents even now are not truly aware of her creative output.

“They are unaware that Klein exists, they think I’m at university doing social science,” she says, laughing. “My life is really on some Hannah Montana kind of beat.”

Sleep With a Cane: Her Latest Album

The artist's most recent album, the singular Sleep With a Cane, brings together sixteen avant-classical pieces, twisted ambient tunes and haunted musique concrète. The sprawling record reinterprets hip-hop compilation abundance as an uncanny reflection on the surveillance state, police brutality and the everyday anxiety and pressure of moving through the city as a Black individual.

“The titles of my songs are always quite literal,” she says. “Family Employment 2008–2014 is ironic, because that was just absent for my family, so I composed a piece to help me understand what was going on during that period.”

The modified instrument work For 6 Guitar, Damilola merges traditional titling into a homage to Damilola Taylor, the child Nigerian schoolboy killed in 2000. Trident, a 16-second burst of a track including snatches of vocals from the Manchester luminaries an electronic duo, embodies Klein’s feelings about the eponymous police unit established to tackle firearms violence in Black communities at the start of the 2000s.

“It’s this repeating, break that constantly interrupts the flow of a ordinary person attempting to lead a regular life,” she says.

Surveillance, Paranoia, and Creative Expression

The track transitions into the unsettling ambient soundscape of Young, Black and Free, with input from a Swedish artist, member of the cult Scandinavian hip-hop group Drain Gang.

“When we were completing the song, I realised it was more of a question,” Klein says of its name. “At one time where I resided in this area that was constantly monitored,” she continues. “I observed police on equestrian units every single day, to the extent that I remember someone remarked I was probably recording sirens [in her music]. Not at all! Every audio was from my real surroundings.”

Sleep With a Cane’s most striking, difficult composition, Informa, conveys this persistent sense of oppression. Opening with a sample of a television report about young people in London exchanging “a existence of violence” for “artistry and self-reliance”, Klein exposes traditional news platitudes by illuminating the hardship suffered by African-Caribbean teenagers.

By stretching, repeating and reworking the audio, she elongates and intensifies its myopic ridiculousness. “That in itself sums up how I was seen when I first started creating music,” she says, “with people using strange dog whistles to allude to the fact that I’m Black, or point to the fact that I grew up in poverty, without just stating the actual situation.”

As though channelling this frustration, Informa eventually erupts into a dazzling iridescent swell, maybe the most straightforwardly gorgeous passage of Klein’s body of work so far. And yet, seething just under the exterior, a menacing conclusion: “Your life doesn’t flash before your eyes.”

This urgency of this daily stress is the driving force of Klein’s work, something few creatives have expressed so complexly. “I’m akin to an hopeful pessimist,” she declares. “Everything are going to shit, but there are still things that are wondrous.”

Dissolving Boundaries and Embracing Freedom

Her ongoing attempts to break down boundaries among the dizzying range of styles, media and influences that her output encompasses have prompted reviewers and followers to label her as an experimental master, or an non-mainstream creator.

“What does being completely unrestricted appear to be?” Klein poses in reply. “Art that is deemed classical or atmospheric is set aside for the experimental festivals or institutions, but in my head I’m like, absolutely not! This