Klein's audacious artistic universe
The constantly trending hip-hop clip platform Radar Rap has showcased improvised raps from some of the biggest musicians globally. Drake, the UK drill star and the Bronx rapper have each graced the channel, yet throughout its seven-year existence, rarely any performers have performed as uniquely as Klein.
Some folks were trying to fight me!” she exclaims, giggling as she looks back on her appearance. “I was just expressing freely! Some people liked it, some people didn’t, a few hated it so much they would send me emails. For someone to experience that so intensely as to contact me? Low key? Legendary.”
A Polarising Spectrum of Artistic Work
Klein’s highly diverse output exists on this divisive axis. For every collaboration with an indie-pop singer or appearance on a Mike record, you can anticipate a frazzled drone album recorded in a one session to be submitted for award nomination or the quiet, digital-only publication of one of her “rare” hip-hop songs.
Along with unsettling music clip she creates or smiling appearance with Earl Sweatshirt, she releases a Real Housewives review or a full-blown movie, starring kindred spirit musician Mica Levi and cultural theorist Fred Moten as her family. She once convinced Charlotte Church to duet with her and recently starred as a supernatural character in a solo play in LA.
Multiple times throughout our extended online interview, talking animatedly against a hypersaturated digital seaside backdrop, she sums up it perfectly herself: “You couldn’t invent this!”
DIY Ethos and Autodidact Roots
Such diversity is testament to Klein’s DIY approach. Completely autodidactic, with “a few” school qualifications to her name, she operates on instinct, considering her passion of reality TV as seriously as inspiration 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 think like a Nigerian financial scam artist, because I’m still figuring things out,” she admits.
She prefers privacy when it in regards to biography, though she credits growing up in the church and the mosque as shaping her approach to music-making, as well as certain elements of her adolescent background producing footage and working as archivist and researcher in television. Yet, despite an remarkably extensive body of work, she states her family still are not truly informed of her creative output.
“They have no idea that my artist persona exists, they believe I’m at uni studying anthropology,” she remarks, laughing. “My existence is really on some secret double-life type beat.”
Sleep With a Cane: Her Newest Project
The artist's most recent project, the unique Sleep With a Cane, collects 16 avant-classical compositions, twisted ambient folk songs and haunted musique concrète. The expansive record reinterprets rap mixtape excess as an uncanny meditation on the surveillance state, police brutality and the daily anxiety and stress of navigating the city as a Black individual.
“The titles of my tracks are consistently quite literal,” she says. “Family Employment 2008–2014 is ironic, because that was just nonexistent for my family, so I composed a score to help me understand what was happening around that time.”
The prepared guitar work For 6 Guitar, Damilola merges classical titling into a homage to Damilola Taylor, the 10-year-old Nigerian-born student murdered in 2000. Trident, a 16-second burst of a song featuring snatches of vocals from the UK city luminaries an electronic duo, embodies Klein’s feelings about the eponymous law enforcement team established to tackle gun crime in Black communities at the start of the 2000s.
“It’s this echoing, interlude that constantly disrupts the flow of a normal individual trying to lead a normal existence,” she comments.
Surveillance, Paranoia, and Creative Expression
The song transitions into the disturbing drone soundscape of Young, Black and Free, with input from a Swedish artist, member of the cult Scandinavian hip-hop group an underground collective.
“When we were completing the track, I realised it was rather a question,” Klein notes of its name. “There was a period where I resided in this area that was always surveilled,” she adds. “I saw officers on equestrian units daily, to the point that I remember someone said I was probably recording sirens [in her music]. Not at all! Each sound was from my actual surroundings.”
Sleep With a Cane’s most striking, difficult composition, Informa, conveys this persistent sense of oppression. Starting with a sample of a news broadcast about young people in London exchanging “a existence of violence” for “artistry and self-reliance”, Klein exposes legacy media cliches by illuminating the oppression suffered by African-Caribbean teenagers.
By stretching, looping and reworking the audio, she elongates and intensifies its myopic ridiculousness. “That in itself epitomizes how I was seen when I began making stuff,” she says, “with people employing strange coded language to allude to the fact that I’m of color, or allude to the fact that I was raised poor, without just saying the actual situation.”
As though channelling this anger, Informa finally bursts into a brilliant pearlescent swell, maybe the most purely beautiful passage of Klein’s discography so far. However, simmering just beneath the surface, a sinister coda: “Your life doesn’t appear in front of your eyes.”
The urgency of this daily tension is the driving energy of Klein’s art, something few artists have captured so complexly. “I’m like an optimistic pessimist,” she declares. “All things are going to shit, but there are nonetheless things that are wondrous.”
Dissolving Boundaries and Embracing Freedom
Klein’s consistent attempts to break down boundaries among the overwhelming variety of genre, formats and influences that her output includes have prompted critics and followers to describe her as an innovative virtuoso, or an outsider artist.
“What does existing completely unrestricted look like?” Klein offers in response. “Art that is considered classical or ambient is reserved for the experimental festivals or academia, but in my head I’m like, oh hell no! This