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The ever-viral hip-hop video platform Radar Rap has showcased improvised raps from numerous top-tier artists globally. Drake, the UK drill star and Ice Spice have each appeared on the show, yet throughout its seven-year existence, few acts have performed quite like Klein.

Some folks were attempting to beat me up!” she says, laughing as she reflects on her performance. “I was just expressing freely! Some people liked it, others did not, some people despised it so much they would send me messages. For someone to feel that so viscerally as to contact me? Honestly? Legendary.”

A Divisive Spectrum of Creative Work

Klein’s highly varied music exists on this polarising axis. For every partnership with an indie-pop singer or appearance on a Mike record, you can expect a frazzled drone album made in a one sitting to be put up for Grammy consideration or the quiet, digital-only release of one of her “once in a blue moon” rap songs.

Along with disturbing rap video she directs or smiling cameo alongside an underground rapper, she puts out a Real Housewives review or a full-length movie, featuring kindred spirit musician an avant-garde artist and academic a writer as her family. She once persuaded the Welsh singer to duet with her and recently starred as a vampire missionary in a one-woman play in LA.

On several occasions during our long online interview, speaking animatedly against a hypersaturated virtual beach scene, she encapsulates it best herself: “You couldn’t invent this!”

DIY Philosophy and Self-Taught Roots

This plurality is proof to Klein’s do-it-yourself approach. Completely self taught, with “a few” GCSEs to her name, she operates on instinct, taking her passion of television shows as importantly as inspiration as she does the work of peers a visual artist and the art award winner a British artist.

“Sometimes I sense like a novice, and then sometimes I think like a 419 fraudster, because I’m still figuring things out,” she says.

She opts for privacy when it comes to biography, though she attributes growing up in the Christian community and the mosque as influencing her approach to music-making, as well as certain aspects of her adolescent background editing footage and serving as archivist and researcher in television. However, in spite of an remarkably substantial body of work, she states her family even now aren’t truly aware of her creative endeavors.

“They are unaware that my artist persona is real, they believe I’m at university studying anthropology,” she remarks, laughing. “My life is truly on some Hannah Montana kind of vibe.”

Sleep With a Cane: Her Newest Project

The artist's most recent album, the unique Sleep With a Cane, brings together 16 avant-classical pieces, twisted atmospheric folk songs and eerie sound collage. The sprawling album recasts rap mixtape excess as an eerie reflection on the surveillance state, law enforcement violence and the everyday paranoia and stress of moving through London as a person of colour.

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

The modified instrument composition For 6 Guitar, Damilola merges classical titling into a homage to Damilola Taylor, the 10-year-old Nigerian student murdered in 2000. Trident, a 16-second burst of a track including snatches of voices from the UK city luminaries an electronic duo, captures Klein’s feelings about the titular law enforcement team established to address firearms violence in African-Caribbean neighborhoods at the start of the 2000s.

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

Surveillance, Fear, and Creative Expression

The song transitions into the unsettling ambient soundscape of Young, Black and Free, featuring contributions from a Swedish artist, affiliate of the influential Scandinavian rap collective Drain Gang.

“When we were completing the track, I understood it was rather a question,” Klein says of its title. “At one time where I lived in this area that was always surveilled,” she adds. “I saw police on equestrian units daily, to the extent that I remember someone remarked I must have been sampling police noise [in her music]. Not at all! Each audio was from my actual environment.”

Sleep With a Cane’s most striking, challenging composition, Informa, captures this relentless sense of oppression. Starting with a clip of a television report about youth in London exchanging “a life of aggression” for “creativity and independence”, Klein reveals legacy media platitudes by highlighting the oppression suffered by Black youths.

Through extending, looping and recreating the audio, she elongates and amplifies its myopic ridiculousness. “This in itself epitomizes how I was perceived when I began creating music,” she observes, “with critics employing strange coded language to allude to the fact that I’m of color, or allude to the fact that I grew up poor, without just stating the actual situation.”

As though expressing this anger, Informa eventually erupts into a brilliant pearlescent crescendo, maybe the most straightforwardly gorgeous moment of Klein’s discography to date. And yet, simmering just beneath the surface, a sinister coda: “Your existence doesn’t appear in front of your eyes.”

This immediacy of this daily stress is the animating force of Klein’s art, something few artists have expressed so intricately. “I’m akin to an optimistic nihilist,” she declares. “Everything are going to shit, but there are still things that are magical.”

Dissolving Boundaries and Embracing Freedom

Klein’s consistent efforts to break down boundaries among the dizzying range of genre, formats and inspirations that her output encompasses have led critics and fans to describe her as an innovative virtuoso, or an non-mainstream artist.

“What does being totally unrestricted look like?” Klein poses in reply. “Art that is considered traditional or ambient is set aside for the experimental festivals or academia, but in my head I’m thinking, absolutely not! This