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The ever-viral hip-hop video platform Radar Rap has hosted improvised raps from some of the biggest musicians in the world. The Canadian rapper, the UK drill star and the Bronx rapper have each graced the show, yet throughout its long-running history, few acts have gone in quite like Klein.

“People were trying to beat me up!” she says, giggling as she reflects on her performance. “I was just being myself! Some people enjoyed it, others did not, some people despised it to such an extent they would send me emails. For someone to feel that so viscerally as to contact me? Honestly? Iconic.”

A Polarising Axis of Creative Work

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

Along with unsettling music clip she creates or grinning cameo with an underground rapper, she puts out a Real Housewives recap or a full-blown feature film, starring like-minded musician an avant-garde artist and cultural theorist Fred Moten as her parents. She once convinced Charlotte Church to duet with her and last year starred as a supernatural character in a one-woman play in Los Angeles.

On several occasions during our extended video call, speaking energetically against a hypersaturated digital seaside backdrop, she sums up it perfectly personally: “You couldn’t invent this!”

DIY Philosophy and Autodidact Roots

This diversity is proof to Klein’s do-it-yourself approach. Entirely self taught, with “a few” GCSEs to her name, she operates on intuition, taking her love of reality TV as seriously as influence as she does the art of contemporaries a visual artist and the Turner prize recipient Mark Leckey.

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

Klein prefers privacy when it comes to biography, though she credits growing up in the Christian community and the Islamic center as influencing her method to music-making, as well as certain elements of her teenage background editing video and working as logger and investigator in television. However, in spite of an impressively substantial portfolio, she says her family still aren’t truly informed of her artistic endeavors.

“They are unaware that my artist persona exists, they believe I’m at uni doing social science,” she remarks, laughing. “My life is really on some Hannah Montana kind of vibe.”

Sleep With a Cane: A Latest Project

Her most recent album, the singular Sleep With a Cane, collects 16 experimental classical compositions, slanted ambient folk songs and haunted musique concrète. The sprawling record recasts hip-hop compilation abundance as an eerie reflection on the monitored society, police brutality and the everyday anxiety and pressure of navigating the city as a person of colour.

“The names of my tracks are consistently very direct,” she says. “Family Employment 2008–2014 is funny, because that was just absent for my relatives, so I wrote a score to help me understand what was going on around that period.”

The modified instrument work For 6 Guitar, Damilola collapses traditional titling into a homage to a young victim, the 10-year-old Nigerian schoolboy murdered in 2000. Trident, a 16-second flash of a track featuring snatches of voices from the Manchester artists an electronic duo, captures Klein’s emotions about the titular law enforcement team 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 attempting to live a regular life,” she comments.

Surveillance, Fear, and Artistic Expression

That song transitions into the unsettling drone soundscape of Young, Black and Free, featuring contributions from a Swedish artist, affiliate of the influential Swedish rap collective an underground collective.

“When we were completing the song, I realised it was rather a inquiry,” Klein says of its name. “At one time where I lived in this neighborhood that was always surveilled,” she adds. “I saw police on horses daily, to the extent that I remember someone said I must have been recording sirens [in her music]. No! Each sound was from my real environment.”

Sleep With a Cane’s most striking, challenging piece, Informa, captures this relentless feeling of oppression. Opening with a clip of a television report about youth in London swapping “a existence of aggression” for “creativity and independence”, Klein exposes traditional news platitudes by illuminating the hardship suffered by African-Caribbean teenagers.

By stretching, repeating and recreating the audio, she lengthens and intensifies its short-sighted absurdity. “That in itself epitomizes how I was seen when I began making stuff,” she says, “with critics using weird dog whistles to refer to the fact that I’m Black, or point to the fact that I was raised poor, without just stating the actual situation.”

As if channelling this anger, Informa eventually erupts into a dazzling iridescent crescendo, perhaps the most straightforwardly beautiful passage of Klein’s discography so far. And yet, seething just under the exterior, a sinister conclusion: “Your life does not flash in front of your face.”

The immediacy of this daily stress is the driving force of Klein’s work, a quality few artists have expressed so complexly. “I’m like an optimistic pessimist,” she declares. “All things are going to ruin, but there are nonetheless elements that are wondrous.”

Dissolving Barriers and Championing Liberation

Klein’s ongoing attempts to dissolve boundaries between the dizzying range of genre, formats and influences that her output includes have prompted critics and followers to describe her as an innovative master, or an outsider artist.

“How does being completely unrestricted look like?” Klein offers in response. “Art that is considered classical or ambient is set aside for the experimental events or academia, but in my mind I’m like, oh hell no! This