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The ever-viral hip-hop video channel On the Radar has hosted freestyles from numerous top-tier artists in the world. The Canadian rapper, Central Cee and the Bronx rapper have each graced the channel, yet during its seven-year history, few acts have performed as uniquely as Klein.

Some folks were attempting to fight me!” she says, laughing as she looks back on her performance. “I was just expressing freely! Some people enjoyed it, some people did not, a few hated it so much they would send me emails. For someone to feel that so viscerally as to write me? Honestly? Iconic.”

A Divisive Spectrum of Creative Output

Klein’s wildly varied output exists on this divisive spectrum. Alongside partnership with Caroline Polachek or feature on a producer's album, you can expect a chaotic drone release made in a single session to be put up for award nomination or the quiet, Bandcamp-only release of one of her “once in a blue moon” rap songs.

Along with unsettling music clip she directs or grinning cameo with an underground rapper, she puts out a reality TV recap or a full-length movie, featuring like-minded musician an avant-garde artist and cultural theorist Fred Moten as her parents. She once persuaded the Welsh singer to sing with her and last year performed as a vampire missionary in a one-woman theatre production in LA.

Multiple times throughout our long video call, speaking energetically against a vividly colored digital seaside backdrop, she encapsulates it perfectly herself: “You can’t make it up!”

DIY Philosophy and Self-Taught Roots

Such diversity is testament to Klein’s do-it-yourself ethos. Entirely self taught, with “a few” GCSEs to her name, she operates on intuition, considering her passion of reality TV as importantly as influence as she does the work of contemporaries Diamond Stingily and the art award recipient Mark Leckey.

“Sometimes I sense like a novice, and then sometimes I think like a Nigerian financial fraudster, because I’m still working things out,” she admits.

Klein opts for privacy when it comes to personal history, though she credits being raised in the Christian community and the mosque as influencing her approach to music-making, as well as some aspects of her teenage experiences producing video and working as logger and researcher in TV. Yet, despite an remarkably substantial body of work, she states her parents even now aren’t truly informed of her artistic output.

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

Sleep With a Cane: Her Newest Project

Her latest album, the unique Sleep With a Cane, collects 16 avant-classical compositions, slanted atmospheric tunes and haunted sound collage. The sprawling record recasts hip-hop compilation abundance as an eerie reflection on the monitored society, law enforcement violence and the daily paranoia and pressure of navigating the city as a Black individual.

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

The prepared guitar work For 6 Guitar, Damilola merges traditional naming convention into a homage to Damilola Taylor, the 10-year-old Nigerian student murdered in 2000. Trident, a 16-second burst of a song including snatches of voices from the Manchester artists Space Afrika, captures 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 individual attempting to lead a normal life,” she comments.

Surveillance, Paranoia, and Artistic Response

That song transitions into the unsettling drone soundscape of Young, Black and Free, with contributions from Ecco2K, affiliate of the influential Scandinavian rap collective an underground collective.

“As we were finishing the track, I understood it was more of a inquiry,” Klein notes of its title. “At one time where I lived in this neighborhood that was always surveilled,” she adds. “I saw officers on horses daily, to the point that I recall someone said I was probably sampling sirens [in her music]. No! Every audio was from my real surroundings.”

Sleep With a Cane’s most striking, challenging piece, Informa, conveys this persistent sense of persecution. Opening with a clip of a news broadcast about youth in London swapping “a existence of violence” for “artistry and self-reliance”, Klein exposes legacy media cliches by highlighting the hardship suffered by African-Caribbean teenagers.

Through stretching, looping and reworking the audio, she elongates and intensifies its myopic absurdity. “That in itself epitomizes how I was perceived when I began making music,” she observes, “with people employing weird dog whistles to allude to the reality that I’m Black, or point to the truth that I was raised poor, without just stating the actual situation.”

As if expressing this anger, Informa finally bursts into a dazzling iridescent swell, maybe the most straightforwardly beautiful moment of Klein’s body of work so far. And yet, simmering just beneath the exterior, a menacing conclusion: “Your existence doesn’t flash in front of your eyes.”

This immediacy of this everyday tension is the animating force of Klein’s work, something rare artists have expressed so complexly. “I’m akin to an hopeful nihilist,” she declares. “Everything is going to ruin, but there are still elements that are wondrous.”

Dissolving Boundaries and Championing Liberation

Klein’s ongoing efforts to dissolve boundaries between the overwhelming range of genre, media and influences that her work encompasses have led reviewers and fans to describe her as an experimental master, or an outsider artist.

“How does existing totally unrestricted look to be?” Klein poses in reply. “Music that is considered classical or atmospheric is reserved for the experimental events or institutions, but in my head I’m thinking, oh hell no! This