Klein's provocative artistic world

The constantly trending rap video channel On the Radar has showcased freestyles from some of the biggest musicians globally. Drake, the UK drill star and the Bronx rapper have each appeared on the show, yet throughout its long-running existence, rarely any performers have gone in quite like Klein.

“People were attempting to fight me!” she exclaims, laughing as she looks back on her appearance. “I was just being myself! Some people liked it, some people did not, some people despised it so much they would email me messages. For someone to feel that so intensely as to write me? Honestly? Legendary.”

A Polarising Axis of Creative Work

Klein’s wildly diverse output exists on this divisive spectrum. Alongside collaboration with an indie-pop singer or feature on a Mike album, you can expect a chaotic drone album made in a one sitting to be put up for award nomination or the discreet, digital-only publication of one of her “rare” hip-hop tracks.

For every disturbing rap video she directs or grinning appearance with Earl Sweatshirt, she puts out a reality TV recap or a full-blown movie, featuring kindred spirit musician an avant-garde artist and academic a writer as her family. She once convinced Charlotte Church to duet with her and last year performed as a vampire missionary in a one-woman theatre production in Los Angeles.

On several occasions during our long video call, talking animatedly in front of a vividly colored virtual beach scene, she sums up it best herself: “You can’t invent this!”

DIY Philosophy and Self-Taught Origins

Such plurality is proof to Klein’s DIY ethos. Completely autodidactic, with “two and a half” school qualifications to her name, she operates on intuition, considering her passion of reality TV as importantly as influence as she does the art of peers Diamond Stingily and the art award recipient a British artist.

“At times I feel like a novice, and then sometimes I feel like a Nigerian financial fraudster, because I’m still figuring things out,” she says.

Klein opts for discretion when it comes to biography, though she credits being raised in the Christian community and the mosque as influencing her method to composition, as well as some aspects of her teenage experiences producing footage and serving as logger and investigator in TV. Yet, in spite of an remarkably extensive body of work, she says her parents still are not really aware of her artistic endeavors.

“They are unaware that Klein exists, they believe I’m at university studying social science,” she says, laughing. “My life is truly on some Hannah Montana kind of vibe.”

Sleep With a Cane: Her Newest Album

Her most recent album, the singular Sleep With a Cane, collects sixteen experimental classical compositions, slanted ambient tunes and haunted musique concrète. The expansive album recasts rap mixtape abundance as an eerie meditation on the surveillance state, police brutality and the everyday paranoia and stress of navigating the city as a person of colour.

“The titles of my tracks are consistently quite direct,” she says. “Family Employment 2008–2014 is ironic, because that was just nonexistent for my relatives, so I wrote a piece to help me understand what was going on around that time.”

The modified instrument work For 6 Guitar, Damilola collapses classical naming convention into a homage to a young victim, the child Nigerian schoolboy killed in 2000. Trident, a brief burst of a song including snatches of vocals from the UK city luminaries Space Afrika, captures Klein’s emotions about the eponymous police unit established to address gun crime in Black communities at the start of the 2000s.

“It’s this echoing, break that constantly disrupts the flow of a ordinary individual trying to live a regular existence,” she comments.

Surveillance, Fear, and Creative Expression

That song melts into the disturbing ambient drift of Young, Black and Free, featuring input from a Swedish artist, affiliate of the influential Scandinavian rap collective an underground collective.

“As we were finishing the song, I understood it was rather a question,” Klein notes of its title. “At one time where I lived in this neighborhood that was constantly surveilled,” she continues. “I observed officers on horses every single day, to the extent that I recall someone said I must have been sampling sirens [in her music]. No! Every sound was from my real surroundings.”

Sleep With a Cane’s most stunning, difficult piece, Informa, conveys this relentless feeling of persecution. Starting with a sample of a news broadcast about youth in London exchanging “a existence of violence” for “creativity and independence”, Klein exposes legacy media cliches by illuminating the hardship endured by Black youths.

Through stretching, repeating and recreating the sample, she lengthens and intensifies its myopic absurdity. “This in itself sums up how I was perceived when I first started creating music,” she says, “with critics using strange dog whistles to refer to the fact that I’m of color, or point to the truth that I grew up poor, without just stating the actual situation.”

As though channelling this frustration, Informa finally bursts into a brilliant pearlescent swell, maybe the most straightforwardly beautiful passage of Klein’s body of work to date. And yet, simmering just under the surface, a sinister conclusion: “Your life doesn’t flash in front of your eyes.”

The immediacy of this everyday tension is the animating energy of Klein’s art, a quality rare artists have captured so complexly. “I’m akin to an hopeful pessimist,” she declares. “All things are going to shit, but there are nonetheless things that are wondrous.”

Dissolving Boundaries and Embracing Liberation

Her ongoing efforts to dissolve boundaries between the overwhelming variety of styles, formats and influences that her output encompasses have led critics and followers to label her as an innovative master, or an non-mainstream artist.

“How does being completely unrestricted look to be?” Klein poses in reply. “Art that is considered traditional or atmospheric is reserved for the avant-garde events or institutions, but in my mind I’m like, oh hell no! This