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The constantly trending rap video platform On the Radar has hosted improvised raps from numerous top-tier musicians globally. The Canadian rapper, Central Cee and the Bronx rapper have each graced the show, yet throughout its seven-year history, rarely any performers have gone in quite like Klein.

Some folks were trying to fight me!” she says, laughing as she reflects on her performance. “I was just expressing freely! Some people enjoyed it, others didn’t, a few despised it so much they would send me emails. For someone to experience that so intensely as to write me? Honestly? Iconic.”

A Divisive Spectrum of Creative Output

Her highly varied music exists on this divisive axis. For every partnership with Caroline Polachek or feature on a Mike record, you can expect a chaotic drone album recorded in a single session to be put up for Grammy nomination or the quiet, Bandcamp-only publication of one of her “rare” rap songs.

Along with unsettling music clip she creates or smiling appearance alongside an underground rapper, she puts out a Real Housewives review or a full-length movie, starring like-minded composer an avant-garde artist and academic Fred Moten as her family. She once convinced Charlotte Church to duet with her and last year performed as a supernatural character in a solo play in LA.

On several occasions during our long video call, talking animatedly against a hypersaturated virtual seaside backdrop, she encapsulates it perfectly personally: “You can’t invent this!”

DIY Ethos and Autodidact Origins

Such diversity is testament to Klein’s DIY approach. Entirely self taught, with “a few” GCSEs to her name, she works on instinct, taking her passion of reality TV as importantly as influence as she does the art of contemporaries a visual artist and the art award winner a British artist.

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

Klein opts for privacy when it comes to personal history, though she credits growing up in the church and the Islamic center as shaping her approach to music-making, as well as certain aspects of her adolescent experiences editing video and working as logger and investigator in television. However, despite an remarkably substantial portfolio, she says her parents even now are not truly informed of her artistic endeavors.

“They have no idea that my artist persona is real, they think I’m at university studying anthropology,” she remarks, chuckling. “My existence is truly on some Hannah Montana kind of vibe.”

Sleep With a Cane: Her Newest Project

The artist's most recent album, the singular Sleep With a Cane, collects 16 avant-classical pieces, slanted ambient folk songs and haunted musique concrète. The expansive album recasts hip-hop compilation excess as an uncanny meditation on the surveillance state, law enforcement violence and the daily anxiety and pressure of moving through London as a Black individual.

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

The modified instrument work For 6 Guitar, Damilola merges classical titling into a homage to Damilola Taylor, the child Nigerian schoolboy murdered in 2000. Trident, a brief burst of a track including snatches of vocals from the Manchester luminaries an electronic duo, captures Klein’s emotions about the eponymous law enforcement team set up to tackle firearms violence in African-Caribbean neighborhoods at the turn of the millennium.

“It’s this echoing, interlude that repeatedly disrupts the rhythm of a normal individual trying to live a regular existence,” she comments.

Surveillance, Fear, and Creative Expression

The track transitions into the disturbing drone drift of Young, Black and Free, featuring contributions from Ecco2K, member of the influential Scandinavian hip-hop group an underground collective.

“When we were finishing the song, I understood it was more of a inquiry,” Klein says of its name. “At one time where I lived in this neighborhood that was always surveilled,” she adds. “I saw police on equestrian units every single day, to the point that I remember someone said I was probably sampling sirens [in her music]. No! Each sound was from my actual environment.”

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

By stretching, looping and recreating the audio, she lengthens and intensifies its short-sighted ridiculousness. “This in itself epitomizes how I was seen when I began making stuff,” she says, “with critics employing weird 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 if expressing this anger, Informa finally erupts into a brilliant pearlescent crescendo, maybe the most purely beautiful passage of Klein’s body of work to date. And yet, seething just under the exterior, a sinister conclusion: “One's life does not flash in front of your eyes.”

This urgency of this everyday tension is the animating energy of Klein’s work, a quality few artists have captured so intricately. “I’m like an optimistic nihilist,” she says. “Everything is going to ruin, but there are nonetheless things that are wondrous.”

Dissolving Barriers and Championing Liberation

Klein’s ongoing efforts to dissolve boundaries among the dizzying range of genre, media and influences that her work includes have led reviewers and followers to describe her as an innovative master, or an outsider creator.

“What does existing totally free appear to be?” Klein offers in reply. “Art that is deemed traditional or atmospheric is reserved for the experimental festivals or academia, but in my head I’m like, oh hell no! This