The ever-viral hip-hop video platform On the Radar has hosted freestyles from some of the biggest artists in the world. Drake, Central Cee and Ice Spice have each graced the channel with their presence, yet throughout its seven-year history, few acts have gone in quite like Klein. This time last year, the south London artist spiralled through a procession of evocative flexes, rasped through Auto-Tune over a mind-expanding loop of pitch-shifted wailing, then slung a black guitar over her shoulder to shred through a lacerating noise solo with a joyous smile.
“People were trying to beat me up!” she says, giggling as she reflects on her appearance. “I was just being myself! Some people liked it, some people didn’t, some people hated it so much they would send me emails. For someone to feel that so viscerally as to send me an email? Low key? Iconic.”
Klein’s wildly varied output exists on this polarising axis. For every Caroline Polachek collaboration or feature on a Mike record, you can expect a frazzled drone album recorded in a single session to be put up for Grammy consideration or the quiet, Bandcamp-only release of one of her “once in a blue moon” rap songs. For every unsettling rap video she directs or grinning appearance alongside Earl Sweatshirt, she puts out a Real Housewives of Atlanta review or a full-blown feature film, starring kindred spirit composer Mica Levi as her social care worker and cultural theorist Fred Moten as her parent. She once convinced Charlotte Church to duet with her and last year starred as a vampire missionary in a one-woman play in Los Angeles.
On several occasions throughout our long video call, talking animatedly against a hypersaturated virtual beach scene, she encapsulates it best herself: “You couldn’t make it up!”
This plurality is testament to Klein’s DIY ethos. Entirely self taught, with “two and a half” GCSEs to her name, she operates on instinct, taking her love of reality TV as seriously as inspiration as she does the work of contemporaries Diamond Stingily and the Turner prize winner Mark Leckey. “Sometimes I feel like a baby, and then sometimes I feel like a 419 [Nigerian financial] scam artist, because I’m still figuring things out,” she says.
She opts for privacy when it comes to biography, though she credits growing up in the church and the mosque as influencing her approach to composition, as well as some aspects of her adolescent experiences editing video and working as logger and researcher in television. Yet, despite an impressively extensive body of work, she says her parents still aren’t really aware of her creative output. “They have no idea that Klein exists, they think I’m at uni doing anthropology,” she says, laughing. “My life is really on some Hannah Montana-type beat.”
Her latest project, the singular Sleep With a Cane, collects 16 avant-classical compositions, slanted ambient folk songs and haunted musique concrète. The sprawling record recasts rap mixtape excess as an eerie meditation on the surveillance state, police brutality and the everyday paranoia and stress of navigating London as a person of colour.
“The titles of my songs are always quite literal,” she says. “Family Employment 2008–2014 is funny, because that was just nonexistent for my family, so I wrote a score to help me understand what was going on around that period.” The prepared guitar composition For 6 Guitar, Damilola collapses classical naming convention into a tribute to Damilola Taylor, the 10-year-old Nigerian schoolboy killed in 2000. Trident, a 16-second flash of a track featuring snatches of vocals from the Manchester luminaries Space Afrika, embodies Klein’s feelings about the titular police unit set up to tackle gun crime in Black communities at the turn of the millennium. “It’s this echoing, interlude break that constantly interrupts the flow of a normal person trying to live a normal life,” she says.
That song melts into the unsettling drone drift of Young, Black and Free, featuring contributions from Ecco2K, affiliate of the cult Swedish rap collective Drain Gang. “As we were finishing the track, I realised it was more of a question,” Klein says of its title. “There was a period where I lived in this area that was constantly surveilled,” she continues. “I saw police on horses every single day, to the point that I remember someone said I must have been sampling police noise [in her music]. No! Every sound was from my actual environment.”
Sleep With a Cane’s most stunning, challenging composition, Informa, captures this relentless sense of persecution. Opening with a sample of a news broadcast about young people in London swapping “a life of violence” for “creativity and independence”, Klein exposes legacy media platitudes by illuminating the oppression suffered by Black youths. By stretching, looping and recreating the sample, she elongates and amplifies its myopic absurdity. “That in itself sums up how I was seen when I first started making stuff,” she says, “with people using weird dog whistles to allude to the fact that I’m Black, or allude to the fact that I grew up poor, without just saying what it is.”
As though channelling this frustration, Informa eventually bursts into a brilliant pearlescent swell, perhaps the most straightforwardly beautiful moment of Klein’s discography so far. And yet, seething just beneath the surface, a sinister coda: “Your life doesn’t flash before your face.” The immediacy of this everyday tension is the animating force of Klein’s work, something few artists have captured so intricately. “I’m like an optimistic nihilist,” she says. “Everything’s going to shit, but there are still things that are magical.”
Klein’s consistent efforts to dissolve boundaries between the dizzying variety of genre, media and influences that her work encompasses have led critics and fans to describe her as an experimental virtuoso, or an outsider artist. “What does being completely free look like?” Klein offers in response. “Music that is deemed classical or ambient is reserved for the experimental festivals or academia, but in my head I’m like, oh hell no! This is something for the streets!” While touring in support of her landmark album Harmattan, released by the highbrow classical label Pentatone, it was the British rapper Jawnino she asked to open for her. “I want to hear harmonica in the strip club!” she continues. “These things shouldn’t be so separate. People do want to hear stuff that is challenging.”
Klein’s outsider status, in all its complexity, has always informed her art, both as self-taught practitioner and unwilling object of state and music industry surveillance. “I feel like just existing as a Black woman makes me an outsider artist,” she says. “I’m going to a show and there’s white men, watching behind me, to see if I’m really playing the guitar. That happens, that’s been happening.
“For me, as long as what I do reaches Black people, I’m good, man,” she enthuses. “If there’s one uncle, who works in my favourite Nigerian restaurant, who likes this one guitar song I did, my job is done!”
• Sleep With a Cane is out now on Parkwuud Entertainment
