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That constantly trending rap clip channel On the Radar has showcased improvised raps from some of the biggest artists globally. Drake, Central Cee and the Bronx rapper have each graced the show, yet throughout its long-running existence, few acts have performed as uniquely as Klein.

Some folks were trying to fight me!” she exclaims, giggling as she looks back on her performance. “I was just being myself! Certain listeners enjoyed it, others did not, some people hated it so much they would send me emails. For someone to experience that so viscerally as to contact me? Honestly? Iconic.”

A Polarising Spectrum of Creative Work

Her wildly varied music exists on this divisive axis. For every partnership with Caroline Polachek or feature on a Mike record, you can expect a chaotic drone release recorded in a one sitting to be submitted for award nomination or the quiet, digital-only release of one of her “rare” rap tracks.

Along with disturbing music clip she directs or grinning cameo with Earl Sweatshirt, she puts out a Real Housewives recap or a full-length movie, starring kindred spirit composer an avant-garde artist and academic Fred Moten as her parents. She once convinced Charlotte Church to duet with her and recently starred as a vampire missionary in a solo theatre production in LA.

Multiple times throughout our extended online interview, talking energetically in front of a hypersaturated virtual beach scene, she encapsulates it perfectly personally: “You couldn’t invent this!”

DIY Ethos and Autodidact Origins

This diversity is proof to Klein’s DIY ethos. Completely autodidactic, with “two and a half” school qualifications to her name, she works on intuition, considering her passion of television shows as seriously as inspiration as she does the work of contemporaries a visual artist and the Turner prize winner a British artist.

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

She prefers discretion when it comes to biography, though she credits being raised in the Christian community and the mosque as shaping her method to music-making, as well as some aspects of her teenage experiences editing footage and working as archivist and investigator in television. However, in spite of an remarkably substantial portfolio, she says her parents still aren’t truly informed of her artistic endeavors.

“They have no idea that Klein exists, they think I’m at university studying social science,” she remarks, chuckling. “My existence is really on some Hannah Montana type beat.”

Sleep With a Cane: Her Latest Album

Her latest album, the unique Sleep With a Cane, collects sixteen avant-classical pieces, twisted atmospheric tunes and haunted musique concrète. The sprawling album reinterprets rap mixtape abundance as an uncanny meditation on the monitored society, police brutality and the everyday paranoia and pressure of moving through the city as a person of colour.

“The titles of my tracks are always very direct,” she says. “Family Employment 2008–2014 is ironic, because that was just absent for my relatives, so I composed a score to process what was going on during that time.”

The prepared guitar composition For 6 Guitar, Damilola merges classical titling into a homage to Damilola Taylor, the child Nigerian-born schoolboy murdered in 2000. Trident, a 16-second burst of a track featuring fragments of voices from the UK city artists an electronic duo, captures Klein’s feelings about the titular police unit established to tackle gun crime in Black communities at the start of the 2000s.

“It’s this repeating, break that constantly interrupts the rhythm of a ordinary individual attempting to live a regular existence,” she says.

Surveillance, Fear, and Creative Expression

The track transitions into the unsettling ambient drift of Young, Black and Free, with input from a Swedish artist, affiliate of the cult Scandinavian hip-hop group Drain Gang.

“When we were finishing the track, I realised it was more of a question,” Klein says of its title. “At one time where I resided in this area that was always monitored,” she continues. “I observed police on horses daily, to the extent that I remember someone remarked I was probably sampling sirens [in her music]. Not at all! Every sound was from my real environment.”

Sleep With a Cane’s most stunning, difficult piece, Informa, captures this persistent feeling of oppression. Opening with a clip of a television report about young people in London swapping “a existence of aggression” for “creativity and independence”, Klein exposes legacy media platitudes by highlighting the oppression suffered by Black youths.

Through stretching, repeating and recreating the sample, she elongates and amplifies its short-sighted ridiculousness. “This in itself sums up how I was seen when I first started creating music,” she says, “with critics using strange coded language to allude to the reality that I’m of color, or allude to the truth that I was raised poor, without just saying the actual situation.”

As though channelling this anger, Informa eventually bursts into a dazzling iridescent crescendo, perhaps the most purely beautiful moment of Klein’s body of work so far. And yet, simmering just under the exterior, a sinister conclusion: “One's life does not flash before your face.”

This urgency of this daily tension is the animating energy of Klein’s work, a quality few artists have captured so intricately. “I’m like an hopeful nihilist,” she declares. “All things are going to shit, but there are still things that are magical.”

Dissolving Barriers and Embracing Liberation

Klein’s ongoing efforts to dissolve divisions among the overwhelming range of genre, media and inspirations that her work includes have prompted reviewers and followers to describe her as an innovative virtuoso, or an non-mainstream artist.

“What does being totally free look to be?” Klein poses in reply. “Music that is considered classical or atmospheric is set aside for the experimental events or academia, but in my mind I’m thinking, absolutely not! This