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That ever-viral hip-hop clip channel On the Radar has hosted improvised raps from some of the biggest artists in the world. The Canadian rapper, Central Cee and Ice Spice have each graced the show, yet during its long-running history, rarely any performers have performed as uniquely as Klein.

Some folks were attempting to beat me up!” she exclaims, giggling as she reflects on her appearance. “I was just being myself! Some people liked it, others didn’t, some people despised it so much they would email me emails. For someone to feel that so intensely as to write me? Honestly? Legendary.”

A Polarising Axis of Creative Work

Klein’s wildly diverse music operates on this polarising axis. Alongside partnership with an indie-pop singer or appearance on a Mike record, you can anticipate a chaotic ambient release made in a single session to be put up for Grammy nomination or the discreet, digital-only publication of one of her “once in a blue moon” rap tracks.

For every disturbing rap video she creates or smiling cameo alongside an underground rapper, she puts out a Real Housewives recap or a full-length feature film, featuring like-minded musician Mica Levi and academic a writer as her family. She once persuaded the Welsh singer to sing with her and recently starred as a vampire missionary in a solo theatre production in Los Angeles.

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

DIY Ethos and Autodidact Origins

Such plurality is proof to Klein’s do-it-yourself approach. Completely autodidactic, with “two and a half” GCSEs to her name, she works on intuition, considering her passion of television shows as seriously as influence as she does the work of contemporaries a visual artist and the art award recipient a British artist.

“At times I sense like a baby, and then sometimes I feel like a 419 scam artist, because I’m still figuring things out,” she says.

She prefers privacy when it in regards to personal history, though she attributes growing up in the church and the mosque as influencing her method to music-making, as well as certain elements of her adolescent background producing video and serving as archivist and investigator in television. However, in spite of an impressively extensive body of work, she states her family still aren’t truly aware of her creative endeavors.

“They are unaware that my artist persona exists, they think I’m at university doing social science,” she says, chuckling. “My existence is truly on some Hannah Montana kind of vibe.”

Sleep With a Cane: Her Newest Album

Her most recent project, the unique Sleep With a Cane, collects sixteen experimental classical compositions, slanted ambient tunes and haunted musique concrète. The sprawling record recasts rap mixtape abundance as an uncanny meditation on the monitored society, police brutality and the daily anxiety and pressure of navigating the city as a person of colour.

“The titles of my songs are consistently very direct,” she says. “Family Employment 2008–2014 is ironic, because that was just absent for my family, so I composed a piece to process what was going on during that time.”

The prepared guitar composition For 6 Guitar, Damilola collapses traditional titling into a homage to a young victim, the 10-year-old Nigerian student killed in 2000. Trident, a brief burst of a song featuring fragments of voices from the Manchester luminaries an electronic duo, embodies Klein’s feelings about the eponymous police unit established to address gun crime in African-Caribbean neighborhoods at the start of the 2000s.

“It’s this echoing, interlude that constantly interrupts the flow of a ordinary person attempting to live a regular existence,” she says.

Surveillance, Fear, and Artistic Response

That track melts into the unsettling ambient drift of Young, Black and Free, with input from Ecco2K, affiliate of the influential Scandinavian rap collective an underground collective.

“When we were completing the song, I realised it was more of a inquiry,” Klein notes of its name. “There was a period where I resided in this area that was constantly monitored,” she continues. “I saw police on horses every single day, to the point that I remember someone remarked I must have been sampling sirens [in her music]. Not at all! Each sound was from my real environment.”

Sleep With a Cane’s most stunning, difficult piece, Informa, conveys this relentless feeling of oppression. Opening with a clip of a news broadcast about young people in the capital swapping “a life of aggression” for “creativity and independence”, Klein reveals traditional news platitudes by highlighting the hardship endured by Black youths.

By extending, repeating and reworking the audio, she elongates and intensifies its myopic ridiculousness. “This in itself sums up how I was perceived when I first started creating music,” she observes, “with people using weird coded language to allude to the fact that I’m Black, or point to the fact that I was raised in poverty, without just stating what it is.”

As though channelling this frustration, Informa eventually erupts into a dazzling pearlescent swell, perhaps the most straightforwardly beautiful passage of Klein’s discography to date. However, seething just under the surface, a menacing coda: “One's life doesn’t appear before your face.”

This immediacy of this daily tension is the animating energy of Klein’s work, a quality few artists have expressed so intricately. “I’m akin to an optimistic pessimist,” she says. “Everything are going to shit, but there are nonetheless things that are wondrous.”

Dissolving Barriers and Championing Freedom

Her ongoing efforts to dissolve divisions among the overwhelming range of styles, formats and influences that her work encompasses have led reviewers and followers to describe her as an innovative master, or an non-mainstream artist.

“How does being completely unrestricted appear like?” Klein poses in response. “Art that is considered classical or atmospheric is reserved for the experimental events or institutions, but in my mind I’m thinking, oh hell no! This