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The ever-viral hip-hop video channel Radar Rap has hosted freestyles from numerous top-tier musicians globally. The Canadian rapper, Central Cee and Ice Spice have each appeared on the show, yet during its long-running existence, rarely any performers have gone in quite like Klein.

“People were trying to beat me up!” she says, laughing as she looks back on her appearance. “I was just being myself! Certain listeners enjoyed it, others did not, some people despised it to such an extent they would send me emails. For someone to experience that so viscerally as to contact me? Honestly? Legendary.”

A Polarising Spectrum of Artistic Work

Her highly diverse music operates on this divisive axis. For every partnership with Caroline Polachek or appearance on a producer's record, you can expect a frazzled ambient release made in a single session to be put up for award nomination or the quiet, digital-only release of one of her “rare” rap songs.

Along with disturbing music clip she directs or smiling cameo alongside Earl Sweatshirt, she puts out a reality TV recap or a full-blown feature film, featuring like-minded composer Mica Levi 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 one-woman play in LA.

On several occasions during our extended online interview, talking energetically in front of a hypersaturated digital seaside backdrop, she sums up it perfectly personally: “You couldn’t invent this!”

DIY Ethos and Self-Taught Roots

This diversity is proof to Klein’s DIY ethos. Entirely autodidactic, with “two and a half” GCSEs to her name, she works on intuition, taking her love of reality TV as seriously as influence as she does the work of peers a visual artist and the Turner prize winner a British artist.

“At times I sense like a novice, and then sometimes I feel like a Nigerian financial fraudster, because I’m still working things out,” she says.

She opts for discretion when it in regards to personal history, though she credits being raised in the Christian community and the Islamic center as shaping her approach to composition, as well as certain elements of her adolescent experiences editing footage and serving as archivist and investigator in television. Yet, in spite of an impressively extensive portfolio, she states her family even now are not truly informed of her artistic endeavors.

“They are unaware that Klein exists, they think I’m at uni doing anthropology,” she remarks, chuckling. “My life is really on some secret double-life type vibe.”

Sleep With a Cane: Her Latest Project

Her latest album, the singular Sleep With a Cane, collects 16 experimental classical compositions, twisted atmospheric tunes and eerie sound collage. The expansive album recasts hip-hop compilation abundance as an uncanny reflection on the monitored society, law enforcement violence and the everyday paranoia and stress of moving through London as a Black individual.

“The names of my tracks are always very literal,” she explains. “Family Employment 2008–2014 is funny, because that was just nonexistent for my family, so I composed a score to process what was happening during that period.”

The modified instrument composition For 6 Guitar, Damilola collapses classical titling into a homage to a young victim, the child Nigerian student killed in 2000. Trident, a brief burst of a song featuring snatches of vocals from the Manchester artists an electronic duo, embodies Klein’s emotions about the eponymous police unit established to tackle gun crime in African-Caribbean neighborhoods at the turn of the millennium.

“It’s this echoing, interlude that constantly disrupts the rhythm of a normal individual attempting to live a normal life,” she comments.

Surveillance, Fear, and Artistic Expression

That song melts into the unsettling drone drift of Young, Black and Free, with input from Ecco2K, member of the cult Swedish hip-hop group an underground collective.

“As we were completing the song, I understood it was rather a inquiry,” Klein notes of its name. “There was a period where I resided in this neighborhood that was constantly monitored,” she adds. “I observed officers on horses daily, to the extent that I recall someone said I must have been sampling police noise [in her music]. Not at all! Every sound was from my actual environment.”

Sleep With a Cane’s most striking, challenging piece, Informa, captures this relentless sense of oppression. Opening with a clip of a television report about youth in the capital swapping “a existence of violence” for “creativity and independence”, Klein reveals traditional news platitudes by highlighting the hardship endured by Black youths.

Through stretching, repeating and reworking the sample, she lengthens and amplifies its short-sighted ridiculousness. “This in itself sums up 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 of color, or point to the fact that I grew up in poverty, without just saying the actual situation.”

As if channelling this anger, Informa eventually bursts into a dazzling iridescent crescendo, perhaps the most purely gorgeous passage of Klein’s body of work so far. However, seething just under the surface, a sinister coda: “One's existence does not appear before your eyes.”

The urgency of this everyday stress is the animating energy of Klein’s work, something rare artists have captured so complexly. “I’m like an hopeful nihilist,” she says. “All things are going to shit, but there are nonetheless things that are wondrous.”

Dissolving Boundaries and Championing Freedom

Klein’s ongoing attempts to break down boundaries among the overwhelming variety of genre, media and influences that her output encompasses have led reviewers and followers to describe her as an innovative virtuoso, or an outsider creator.

“What does being completely unrestricted appear like?” Klein offers in reply. “Art that is deemed traditional or ambient is set aside for the experimental events or institutions, but in my head I’m like, absolutely not! This