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The ever-viral rap clip platform On the Radar has hosted freestyles from numerous top-tier musicians in the world. The Canadian rapper, Central Cee and the Bronx rapper have each graced the show, yet during its seven-year existence, rarely any performers have gone in as uniquely as Klein.

Some folks were attempting to fight me!” she exclaims, giggling as she reflects on her appearance. “I was just expressing freely! Certain listeners liked it, others didn’t, a few hated it so much they would email me messages. For someone to feel that so intensely as to write me? Low key? Iconic.”

A Polarising Axis of Artistic Output

Her highly diverse music operates on this divisive spectrum. Alongside partnership with an indie-pop singer or appearance on a producer's record, you can expect a frazzled drone album recorded in a single sitting to be submitted for award consideration or the quiet, digital-only publication of one of her “rare” rap tracks.

Along with unsettling rap video she directs or smiling appearance alongside Earl Sweatshirt, she puts out a reality TV review or a full-length feature film, starring kindred spirit musician Mica Levi and cultural theorist Fred Moten as her parents. She once persuaded the Welsh singer to sing with her and recently starred as a vampire missionary in a solo play in Los Angeles.

Multiple times during our extended video call, talking animatedly against a hypersaturated digital seaside backdrop, she sums up it perfectly personally: “You couldn’t invent this!”

DIY Ethos and Self-Taught Origins

This plurality is proof to Klein’s DIY approach. Completely self taught, with “two and a half” GCSEs to her name, she operates on instinct, taking her love of television shows as seriously as inspiration as she does the work of peers a visual artist and the art award winner a British artist.

“At times I sense like a novice, and then other times I feel like a 419 scam artist, because I’m still figuring things out,” she says.

She prefers discretion when it in regards to personal history, though she credits growing up in the church and the Islamic center as shaping her approach to composition, as well as certain elements of her teenage background editing video and working as archivist and investigator in TV. However, in spite of an impressively extensive portfolio, she says her parents still aren’t truly informed of her creative endeavors.

“They have no idea that Klein is real, they believe I’m at university doing social science,” she says, laughing. “My life is truly on some Hannah Montana kind of beat.”

Sleep With a Cane: Her Latest Project

Her most recent album, the unique Sleep With a Cane, brings together sixteen avant-classical compositions, twisted atmospheric folk songs and eerie sound collage. The expansive record recasts hip-hop compilation abundance as an uncanny reflection on the surveillance state, police brutality and the everyday paranoia and stress of moving through London as a person of colour.

“The titles of my tracks are always quite direct,” she says. “Family Employment 2008–2014 is funny, because that was just absent for my family, so I wrote a piece to process what was going on around that time.”

The prepared guitar composition For 6 Guitar, Damilola merges classical titling into a homage to a young victim, the child Nigerian schoolboy killed in 2000. Trident, a 16-second flash of a track featuring fragments of voices from the Manchester luminaries Space Afrika, embodies Klein’s emotions about the titular police unit set up to address gun crime in Black communities at the start of the 2000s.

“It’s this repeating, interlude that repeatedly disrupts the rhythm of a ordinary person attempting to lead a regular life,” she says.

Surveillance, Fear, and Creative Expression

That track transitions into the unsettling ambient drift of Young, Black and Free, featuring contributions from a Swedish artist, member of the cult Scandinavian hip-hop group Drain Gang.

“When we were completing the song, I understood it was rather a inquiry,” Klein says of its name. “At one time where I lived in this area that was constantly monitored,” she continues. “I observed police on horses daily, to the point that I recall someone said I was probably recording sirens [in her music]. No! Every sound was from my real environment.”

Sleep With a Cane’s most striking, difficult piece, Informa, captures this persistent feeling of oppression. Starting with a clip of a news broadcast about youth in the capital swapping “a existence of violence” for “creativity and independence”, Klein reveals traditional news cliches by highlighting the oppression endured by African-Caribbean teenagers.

By stretching, repeating and reworking the audio, she elongates and amplifies its short-sighted ridiculousness. “That in itself epitomizes how I was seen when I began creating music,” she observes, “with critics employing strange coded language to refer to the reality that I’m of color, or point to the fact that I was raised poor, without just stating the actual situation.”

As though channelling this anger, Informa finally bursts into a brilliant iridescent swell, maybe the most straightforwardly gorgeous moment of Klein’s body of work so far. However, simmering just under the exterior, a sinister conclusion: “Your life doesn’t appear in front of your eyes.”

This immediacy of this everyday stress is the driving energy of Klein’s art, a quality rare artists have expressed so complexly. “I’m like an hopeful pessimist,” she declares. “Everything is going to shit, but there are still things that are wondrous.”

Dissolving Barriers and Embracing Liberation

Her ongoing attempts to dissolve boundaries among the overwhelming range of genre, formats and influences that her work encompasses have prompted reviewers and fans to describe her as an innovative virtuoso, or an non-mainstream artist.

“How does being totally free appear like?” Klein offers in response. “Art that is considered traditional or ambient is reserved for the avant-garde events or institutions, but in my head I’m thinking, oh hell no! This