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That ever-viral rap clip channel On the Radar has showcased freestyles from some of the biggest musicians in the world. Drake, the UK drill star and the Bronx rapper have each graced the show, yet during its long-running history, rarely any performers have gone in as uniquely as Klein.

Some folks were attempting to beat me up!” she says, giggling as she looks back on her appearance. “I was just being myself! Some people enjoyed it, others did not, a few despised it so much they would email me messages. For someone to experience that so viscerally as to contact me? Low key? Iconic.”

A Divisive Spectrum of Creative Output

Her highly varied output exists on this polarising spectrum. For every partnership with Caroline Polachek or feature on a producer's record, you can anticipate a chaotic drone release recorded in a single session to be submitted for award nomination or the discreet, digital-only publication of one of her “rare” hip-hop songs.

For every unsettling rap video she directs or smiling appearance with Earl Sweatshirt, she puts out a reality TV review or a full-length movie, starring kindred spirit musician an avant-garde artist and cultural theorist a writer as her parents. She once persuaded the Welsh singer to sing with her and recently starred as a vampire missionary in a one-woman theatre production in LA.

Multiple times throughout our extended video call, speaking energetically in front of a hypersaturated digital seaside backdrop, she encapsulates it best personally: “You couldn’t invent this!”

DIY Philosophy and Self-Taught Origins

This diversity is testament to Klein’s do-it-yourself approach. Entirely self taught, with “a few” GCSEs to her name, she works on intuition, considering her love of television shows as importantly as inspiration as she does the art of peers a visual artist and the art award winner a British artist.

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

She opts for privacy when it comes to personal history, though she credits being raised in the church and the Islamic center as influencing her method to composition, as well as some aspects of her teenage background producing video and serving as logger and researcher in television. However, in spite of an impressively extensive portfolio, she states her parents even now aren’t truly informed of her artistic output.

“They are unaware that my artist persona 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 Newest Album

The artist's most recent project, the unique Sleep With a Cane, brings together 16 avant-classical pieces, slanted atmospheric tunes and haunted musique concrète. The sprawling album reinterprets hip-hop compilation abundance as an uncanny reflection on the monitored society, law enforcement violence and the daily paranoia and pressure of navigating the city as a person of colour.

“The names of my songs are always very literal,” she says. “Family Employment 2008–2014 is funny, because that was just nonexistent for my relatives, so I wrote a score to process what was going on during that period.”

The modified instrument composition For 6 Guitar, Damilola collapses traditional naming convention into a tribute to a young victim, the child Nigerian-born schoolboy murdered in 2000. Trident, a brief flash of a track including snatches of voices from the Manchester artists an electronic duo, captures Klein’s feelings about the eponymous law enforcement team set up to tackle gun crime in Black communities at the turn of the millennium.

“It’s this repeating, break that repeatedly interrupts the flow of a ordinary person trying to live a normal life,” she comments.

Surveillance, Paranoia, and Creative Response

That song transitions into the unsettling drone drift of Young, Black and Free, with contributions from Ecco2K, member of the influential Swedish rap collective Drain Gang.

“As we were completing the song, I understood it was more of a inquiry,” Klein notes of its title. “There was a period 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 must have been recording sirens [in her music]. No! Every audio was from my real environment.”

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

By extending, repeating and reworking the sample, she elongates and intensifies its short-sighted ridiculousness. “This in itself epitomizes how I was seen when I first started making stuff,” she observes, “with people using strange coded language to allude to the reality that I’m Black, or allude to the fact that I grew up poor, without just stating the actual situation.”

As if channelling this frustration, Informa eventually bursts into a brilliant iridescent swell, maybe the most purely beautiful passage of Klein’s discography so far. And yet, simmering just under the exterior, a menacing coda: “One's life does not flash before your face.”

The urgency of this daily stress is the animating force of Klein’s work, a quality rare creatives have captured so intricately. “I’m like an hopeful nihilist,” she declares. “Everything is going to ruin, but there are nonetheless elements that are wondrous.”

Dissolving Boundaries and Championing Liberation

Klein’s ongoing attempts to break down boundaries between the dizzying variety of genre, formats and influences that her output encompasses have led critics and fans to describe her as an experimental master, or an non-mainstream artist.

“How does being totally unrestricted look like?” Klein poses in reply. “Music that is deemed classical or atmospheric is reserved for the avant-garde festivals or institutions, but in my head I’m like, oh hell no! This