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That constantly trending hip-hop clip platform On the Radar has showcased improvised raps from some of the biggest musicians in the world. Drake, Central Cee and Ice Spice have each graced the show, yet throughout its long-running existence, rarely any performers have performed as uniquely as Klein.

“People were attempting to fight me!” she says, laughing as she looks back on her performance. “I was just being myself! Some people enjoyed it, others did not, a few despised it to such an extent they would email me emails. For someone to feel that so intensely as to write me? Honestly? Iconic.”

A Divisive Spectrum of Creative Output

Her highly varied output exists on this polarising spectrum. For every collaboration with Caroline Polachek or appearance on a Mike record, you can expect a chaotic drone album recorded in a one session to be submitted for Grammy consideration or the discreet, Bandcamp-only publication of one of her “rare” rap tracks.

Along with disturbing music clip she directs or smiling cameo with an underground rapper, she releases a reality TV recap or a full-blown feature film, featuring kindred spirit musician an avant-garde artist and academic a writer as her family. She once convinced the Welsh singer to sing with her and last year starred as a supernatural character in a one-woman theatre production in LA.

Multiple times throughout our extended video call, speaking energetically in front of a vividly colored virtual beach scene, she sums up it perfectly herself: “You couldn’t make it up!”

DIY Philosophy and Autodidact Roots

This diversity is testament to Klein’s do-it-yourself approach. Entirely self taught, with “a few” school qualifications to her name, she operates on intuition, considering her love of television shows as importantly 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 fraudster, because I’m still working things out,” she says.

She prefers discretion when it comes to biography, though she credits being raised in the Christian community and the Islamic center as influencing her method to music-making, as well as some elements of her adolescent experiences editing footage and working as logger and investigator in TV. Yet, in spite of an impressively extensive portfolio, she states her family still are not truly aware of her artistic output.

“They are unaware that my artist persona is real, they think I’m at uni studying anthropology,” she remarks, chuckling. “My existence is truly on some secret double-life kind of vibe.”

Sleep With a Cane: A Newest Project

Her latest album, the singular Sleep With a Cane, brings together sixteen experimental classical pieces, twisted ambient tunes and eerie sound collage. The expansive record reinterprets rap mixtape excess as an uncanny reflection on the surveillance state, law enforcement violence and the everyday anxiety and stress of navigating the city as a Black individual.

“The titles of my songs are always very literal,” she says. “Family Employment 2008–2014 is ironic, because that was just absent for my family, so I wrote a piece to help me understand what was going on around that time.”

The prepared guitar work For 6 Guitar, Damilola merges classical titling into a homage to Damilola Taylor, the child Nigerian student killed in 2000. Trident, a brief flash of a track featuring fragments of vocals from the UK city artists an electronic duo, embodies Klein’s emotions about the titular police unit set up to tackle firearms violence in Black communities at the turn of the millennium.

“It’s this echoing, interlude that repeatedly disrupts the rhythm of a ordinary person trying to lead a normal existence,” she says.

Surveillance, Paranoia, and Creative Expression

That track transitions into the disturbing drone soundscape of Young, Black and Free, with input from a Swedish artist, member of the influential Scandinavian rap collective Drain Gang.

“As we were finishing the track, I understood it was more of a inquiry,” Klein notes of its title. “There was a period where I lived in this area that was always monitored,” she continues. “I observed police on equestrian units daily, to the extent that I remember someone remarked I must have been recording police noise [in her music]. Not at all! Each sound was from my actual environment.”

Sleep With a Cane’s most stunning, difficult composition, Informa, conveys this persistent sense of oppression. Starting with a clip of a news broadcast about youth in London swapping “a life of violence” for “creativity and independence”, Klein exposes traditional news platitudes by illuminating the hardship endured by African-Caribbean teenagers.

By extending, looping and reworking the audio, she lengthens and intensifies its myopic ridiculousness. “This in itself epitomizes how I was seen when I first started making stuff,” she observes, “with critics employing weird coded language to refer to the fact that I’m Black, or point to the fact that I grew up poor, without just stating what it is.”

As though expressing this anger, Informa eventually bursts into a dazzling pearlescent swell, maybe the most straightforwardly gorgeous passage of Klein’s body of work to date. And yet, simmering just beneath the exterior, a menacing coda: “Your existence does not appear in front of your face.”

The immediacy of this everyday stress is the driving force of Klein’s work, a quality rare creatives have captured so intricately. “I’m akin to an hopeful nihilist,” she declares. “Everything is going to shit, but there are nonetheless things that are magical.”

Dissolving Boundaries and Championing Liberation

Her consistent attempts to break down boundaries among the overwhelming range of styles, formats and influences that her work includes have prompted reviewers and followers to describe her as an innovative virtuoso, or an outsider creator.

“What does existing totally unrestricted look to be?” Klein poses in reply. “Art that is deemed classical or atmospheric is set aside for the experimental festivals or institutions, but in my head I’m thinking, absolutely not! This