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That constantly trending hip-hop clip channel On the Radar has hosted improvised raps from some of the biggest artists globally. The Canadian rapper, Central Cee and the Bronx rapper have each graced the show, yet throughout its long-running history, rarely any performers have gone in as uniquely as Klein.

“People were trying to fight me!” she exclaims, laughing as she reflects on her performance. “I was just being myself! Some people enjoyed it, others didn’t, a few despised it to such an extent they would send me messages. For someone to feel that so viscerally as to contact me? Honestly? Iconic.”

A Divisive Axis of Creative Output

Klein’s highly varied output exists on this polarising spectrum. Alongside collaboration with an indie-pop singer or appearance on a Mike album, you can expect a chaotic drone album made in a single sitting to be submitted for award consideration or the discreet, digital-only publication of one of her “once in a blue moon” rap tracks.

Along with unsettling rap video she directs or grinning cameo with an underground rapper, she releases a Real Housewives recap or a full-blown feature film, starring kindred spirit composer Mica Levi and cultural theorist a writer as her family. She once convinced Charlotte Church to sing with her and last year performed as a vampire missionary in a one-woman play in Los Angeles.

Multiple times during our long video call, talking energetically in front of a hypersaturated virtual beach scene, she encapsulates it perfectly personally: “You can’t invent this!”

DIY Philosophy and Autodidact Origins

This plurality is testament to Klein’s do-it-yourself ethos. Completely autodidactic, with “two and a half” school qualifications to her name, she works on intuition, taking her love of reality TV as seriously as influence as she does the work of peers Diamond Stingily and the art award winner a British artist.

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

Klein opts for privacy when it comes to biography, though she credits being raised in the Christian community and the Islamic center as shaping her approach to composition, as well as certain elements of her teenage background editing video and serving as archivist and investigator in TV. Yet, in spite of an impressively extensive body of work, she states her family still are not truly informed of her creative endeavors.

“They have no idea that Klein is real, they believe I’m at university doing anthropology,” she remarks, chuckling. “My existence is truly on some Hannah Montana kind of vibe.”

Sleep With a Cane: Her Latest Album

The artist's latest album, the unique Sleep With a Cane, brings together sixteen experimental classical compositions, twisted atmospheric folk songs and haunted musique concrète. The sprawling album recasts hip-hop compilation excess as an uncanny reflection on the monitored society, law enforcement violence and the everyday paranoia and stress of navigating London as a person of colour.

“The titles of my songs are consistently quite literal,” she says. “Family Employment 2008–2014 is funny, because that was just absent for my relatives, so I wrote a score to process what was going on around that time.”

The prepared guitar work For 6 Guitar, Damilola merges traditional naming convention into a tribute to a young victim, the child Nigerian-born student murdered in 2000. Trident, a 16-second flash of a song including fragments of voices from the Manchester artists Space Afrika, captures Klein’s feelings about the titular police unit set up to tackle gun crime in Black communities at the turn of the millennium.

“It’s this echoing, interlude that repeatedly interrupts the flow of a ordinary person trying to live a regular existence,” she says.

Surveillance, Paranoia, and Creative Response

The track transitions into the disturbing ambient soundscape of Young, Black and Free, featuring contributions from a Swedish artist, affiliate of the cult Swedish hip-hop group Drain Gang.

“As we were completing the track, I understood it was more of a inquiry,” Klein says of its title. “There was a period where I lived in this area that was always surveilled,” she continues. “I observed officers on equestrian units every single day, to the point that I remember someone said I was probably sampling police noise [in her music]. No! Each audio was from my real environment.”

Sleep With a Cane’s most striking, difficult composition, Informa, captures this relentless feeling of oppression. Opening with a clip of a news broadcast about youth in London exchanging “a existence of aggression” for “creativity and self-reliance”, Klein reveals traditional news platitudes by illuminating the oppression endured by African-Caribbean teenagers.

By stretching, looping and recreating the audio, she elongates and amplifies its myopic absurdity. “This in itself sums up how I was seen when I first started creating music,” she observes, “with people using weird dog whistles to refer to the fact that I’m Black, or allude to the fact that I grew up poor, without just saying what it is.”

As if expressing this anger, Informa eventually erupts into a dazzling iridescent crescendo, maybe the most straightforwardly gorgeous passage of Klein’s body of work to date. However, simmering just under the exterior, a sinister conclusion: “Your life does not flash before your face.”

The urgency of this daily tension is the driving energy of Klein’s work, a quality few artists have expressed so complexly. “I’m akin to an hopeful pessimist,” she says. “Everything is going to shit, but there are nonetheless elements that are wondrous.”

Dissolving Boundaries and Championing Freedom

Klein’s ongoing attempts to dissolve divisions among the dizzying range of styles, formats and influences that her output includes have prompted critics and fans to describe her as an experimental virtuoso, or an non-mainstream creator.

“What does existing completely unrestricted look to be?” Klein poses in reply. “Art that is deemed traditional or ambient is set aside for the experimental festivals or academia, but in my mind I’m like, absolutely not! This