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The constantly trending hip-hop video channel Radar Rap has hosted freestyles from some of the biggest artists in the world. Drake, Central Cee and the Bronx rapper have each graced the channel, yet during its seven-year existence, rarely any performers have gone in as uniquely as Klein.

Some folks were attempting to beat me up!” she exclaims, laughing as she looks back on her performance. “I was just expressing freely! Certain listeners liked it, others did not, some people hated it to such an extent they would send me emails. For someone to feel that so intensely as to contact me? Low key? Legendary.”

A Polarising Axis of Artistic Output

Klein’s wildly varied music exists on this polarising axis. For every collaboration with Caroline Polachek or feature on a producer's record, you can expect a frazzled ambient release recorded in a single session to be put up for Grammy nomination or the discreet, digital-only release of one of her “once in a blue moon” hip-hop tracks.

Along with disturbing rap video she creates or smiling cameo with an underground rapper, she releases a reality TV review or a full-length feature film, featuring like-minded musician Mica Levi and cultural theorist Fred Moten as her parents. She once persuaded the Welsh singer to duet with her and last year performed as a vampire missionary in a solo play in LA.

On several occasions throughout our long online interview, speaking animatedly against a hypersaturated virtual beach scene, she sums up it perfectly personally: “You can’t invent this!”

DIY Ethos and Self-Taught Origins

This plurality is testament to Klein’s DIY ethos. Completely autodidactic, with “a few” GCSEs to her name, she works on intuition, taking her love of reality TV as importantly as influence as she does the art of contemporaries Diamond Stingily and the art award recipient a British artist.

“Sometimes I feel like a novice, and then other times I feel like a Nigerian financial scam artist, because I’m still figuring things out,” she says.

She prefers privacy when it in regards to personal history, though she credits growing up in the Christian community and the Islamic center as shaping her approach to music-making, as well as certain aspects of her adolescent background producing video and working as archivist and researcher in television. However, despite an remarkably substantial portfolio, she says her family still are not really aware of her artistic endeavors.

“They are unaware that Klein is real, they believe I’m at university studying anthropology,” she says, laughing. “My life is truly on some secret double-life kind of vibe.”

Sleep With a Cane: Her Newest Project

Her latest project, the unique Sleep With a Cane, brings together 16 avant-classical compositions, slanted atmospheric tunes and eerie musique concrète. The sprawling record reinterprets hip-hop compilation excess as an eerie reflection on the monitored society, law enforcement violence and the daily paranoia and pressure of moving through the city as a Black individual.

“The names of my songs are always quite literal,” she says. “Family Employment 2008–2014 is ironic, because that was just absent for my relatives, so I composed a score to process what was happening around that period.”

The prepared guitar work For 6 Guitar, Damilola collapses classical naming convention into a homage to a young victim, the child Nigerian-born student murdered in 2000. Trident, a brief burst of a song including snatches of voices from the UK city luminaries an electronic duo, embodies Klein’s feelings about the eponymous police unit set up to tackle gun crime in African-Caribbean neighborhoods at the start of the 2000s.

“It’s this repeating, interlude that repeatedly interrupts the flow of a normal individual attempting to lead a normal life,” she comments.

Surveillance, Paranoia, and Creative Response

That song transitions into the disturbing ambient drift of Young, Black and Free, with contributions from Ecco2K, affiliate of the cult Scandinavian rap collective Drain Gang.

“As we were finishing the song, I realised it was rather a question,” Klein notes of its name. “At one time where I lived in this neighborhood that was constantly monitored,” she continues. “I observed officers on equestrian units every single day, to the extent that I recall someone said I was probably recording police noise [in her music]. Not at all! Each sound was from my actual environment.”

Sleep With a Cane’s most stunning, challenging piece, Informa, captures this persistent sense of persecution. Starting with a clip of a television report about young people in the capital exchanging “a existence of aggression” for “creativity and independence”, Klein exposes traditional news cliches by highlighting the hardship suffered by Black youths.

Through stretching, repeating and recreating the sample, she lengthens and amplifies its short-sighted ridiculousness. “This in itself epitomizes how I was perceived when I first started making music,” she says, “with people using strange dog whistles to refer to the reality that I’m of color, or point to the truth that I grew up in poverty, without just saying the actual situation.”

As if expressing this anger, Informa finally erupts into a dazzling pearlescent crescendo, perhaps the most purely gorgeous passage of Klein’s body of work so far. However, simmering just beneath the exterior, a sinister coda: “Your existence does not flash in front of your face.”

This urgency of this daily stress is the driving force of Klein’s art, something few creatives have captured so intricately. “I’m like an hopeful nihilist,” she says. “Everything are going to ruin, but there are still things that are magical.”

Dissolving Barriers and Embracing Liberation

Her ongoing efforts to dissolve boundaries among the dizzying range of styles, media and influences that her work includes have prompted critics and followers to describe her as an innovative master, or an outsider creator.

“How does existing completely free look like?” Klein offers in reply. “Art that is deemed traditional or ambient is reserved for the experimental festivals or academia, but in my head I’m thinking, oh hell no! This