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The constantly trending rap clip channel Radar Rap has hosted improvised raps from some of the biggest artists globally. The Canadian rapper, the UK drill star and Ice Spice have each graced the show, yet throughout its long-running history, rarely any performers have performed quite like Klein.

“People were trying to fight me!” she says, giggling as she looks back on her appearance. “I was just expressing freely! Certain listeners enjoyed it, some people did not, a few hated it so much they would send me messages. For someone to feel that so viscerally as to write me? Honestly? Iconic.”

A Polarising Spectrum of Artistic Output

Klein’s wildly varied output exists on this polarising spectrum. For every collaboration with an indie-pop singer or feature on a Mike album, you can anticipate a chaotic ambient album made in a one sitting to be submitted for award consideration or the discreet, Bandcamp-only publication of one of her “once in a blue moon” rap songs.

For every disturbing music clip she directs or grinning appearance with Earl Sweatshirt, she puts out a Real Housewives recap or a full-length feature film, starring kindred spirit composer an avant-garde artist and cultural theorist a writer as her family. She once convinced Charlotte Church to duet with her and recently performed as a supernatural character in a solo play in Los Angeles.

Multiple times during our long video call, speaking energetically in front of a vividly colored digital seaside backdrop, she sums up it perfectly personally: “You can’t make it up!”

DIY Philosophy and Autodidact Origins

This plurality is testament to Klein’s DIY ethos. Entirely self taught, with “two and a half” GCSEs to her name, she works on intuition, considering her love of television shows as importantly as inspiration as she does the work of peers a visual artist and the Turner prize recipient a British artist.

“At times I feel like a novice, and then other times I feel like a 419 fraudster, because I’m still figuring things out,” she says.

Klein opts for discretion when it in regards to biography, though she credits growing up in the church and the mosque as influencing her approach to composition, as well as certain elements of her adolescent experiences producing video and serving as logger and researcher in TV. However, in spite of an remarkably substantial body of work, she says her family even now are not truly informed of her creative output.

“They are unaware that my artist persona is real, they believe I’m at uni studying social science,” she says, chuckling. “My life is really on some Hannah Montana kind of beat.”

Sleep With a Cane: A Latest Project

Her most recent album, the unique Sleep With a Cane, collects sixteen experimental classical compositions, slanted atmospheric tunes and haunted sound collage. The sprawling album recasts rap mixtape abundance as an uncanny meditation on the monitored society, law enforcement violence and the daily paranoia and pressure of navigating London as a person of colour.

“The names of my tracks are always quite literal,” she explains. “Family Employment 2008–2014 is funny, because that was just absent for my family, so I wrote a piece to help me understand what was happening during that period.”

The prepared guitar composition For 6 Guitar, Damilola merges classical naming convention into a homage to a young victim, the child Nigerian-born schoolboy murdered in 2000. Trident, a 16-second burst of a song including fragments of vocals from the Manchester artists an electronic duo, embodies Klein’s feelings about the titular law enforcement team set up to tackle firearms violence in African-Caribbean neighborhoods at the start of the 2000s.

“It’s this repeating, interlude that repeatedly interrupts the rhythm of a normal individual trying to live a normal life,” she says.

Surveillance, Paranoia, and Creative Response

That song transitions into the disturbing drone soundscape of Young, Black and Free, featuring input from a Swedish artist, member of the cult Swedish hip-hop group an underground collective.

“As we were finishing the track, I realised it was more of a inquiry,” Klein says of its name. “There was a period where I lived in this neighborhood that was constantly monitored,” she continues. “I observed officers on horses every single day, to the point that I recall someone remarked I must have been recording sirens [in her music]. No! Each audio was from my actual surroundings.”

Sleep With a Cane’s most stunning, difficult piece, Informa, captures this relentless feeling of persecution. Opening with a sample of a television report about youth in the capital exchanging “a existence of aggression” for “artistry and self-reliance”, Klein reveals legacy media platitudes by illuminating the hardship suffered by Black youths.

Through stretching, looping and reworking the sample, she lengthens and amplifies its short-sighted absurdity. “That in itself epitomizes how I was perceived when I began creating music,” she observes, “with critics employing weird coded language to allude to the reality that I’m Black, or point to the fact that I grew up poor, without just stating what it is.”

As if channelling this frustration, Informa finally erupts into a dazzling pearlescent crescendo, maybe the most straightforwardly gorgeous moment of Klein’s discography to date. However, seething just under the exterior, a sinister conclusion: “Your life doesn’t appear in front of your face.”

The urgency of this everyday tension is the animating energy of Klein’s work, something rare creatives have expressed so intricately. “I’m akin to an optimistic nihilist,” she says. “Everything is going to ruin, but there are still elements that are magical.”

Dissolving Barriers and Championing Freedom

Her consistent efforts to break down boundaries among the dizzying range of genre, formats and influences that her output includes have prompted critics and followers to describe her as an innovative virtuoso, or an non-mainstream creator.

“How does existing totally unrestricted appear like?” Klein poses in response. “Music that is deemed classical or ambient is set aside for the experimental festivals or institutions, but in my head I’m like, absolutely not! This