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

“People were attempting to fight me!” she says, giggling as she reflects on her performance. “I was just expressing freely! Some people enjoyed it, others did not, some people hated it to such an extent they would send me messages. For someone to experience that so viscerally as to write me? Honestly? Legendary.”

A Divisive Axis of Creative Output

Klein’s highly diverse output exists on this divisive axis. Alongside collaboration with an indie-pop singer or feature on a producer's album, you can expect a frazzled ambient release recorded in a single session to be put up for Grammy nomination or the quiet, Bandcamp-only publication of one of her “once in a blue moon” hip-hop tracks.

Along with disturbing music clip she directs or grinning appearance alongside Earl Sweatshirt, she releases a Real Housewives review or a full-blown feature film, starring like-minded composer an avant-garde artist and academic Fred Moten as her family. She once convinced the Welsh singer to duet with her and recently starred as a vampire missionary in a solo theatre production in Los Angeles.

On several occasions throughout our long online interview, speaking energetically against a hypersaturated digital beach scene, she sums up it best personally: “You can’t make it up!”

DIY Philosophy and Self-Taught Roots

Such diversity is testament to Klein’s do-it-yourself approach. Completely autodidactic, with “a few” GCSEs to her name, she works on intuition, taking her love of television shows as seriously as influence as she does the art of peers Diamond Stingily and the Turner prize winner a British artist.

“At times I sense like a baby, and then other times I think like a Nigerian financial scam artist, because I’m still figuring things out,” she says.

She opts for discretion when it comes to personal history, though she attributes being raised in the Christian community and the mosque as shaping her approach to composition, as well as some aspects of her teenage experiences editing video and working as archivist and investigator in TV. However, despite an impressively extensive portfolio, she states her family even now are not truly aware of her creative endeavors.

“They are unaware that Klein exists, they think I’m at uni studying social science,” she says, chuckling. “My life is truly on some Hannah Montana type vibe.”

Sleep With a Cane: A Latest Album

The artist's most recent project, the unique Sleep With a Cane, collects 16 avant-classical pieces, slanted atmospheric folk songs and haunted sound collage. The expansive album recasts hip-hop compilation abundance 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 names of my tracks are consistently very literal,” she explains. “Family Employment 2008–2014 is funny, because that was just nonexistent for my relatives, so I composed a piece to help me understand what was happening around that period.”

The prepared guitar work For 6 Guitar, Damilola collapses traditional titling into a tribute to Damilola Taylor, the 10-year-old Nigerian-born student murdered in 2000. Trident, a 16-second flash of a track including snatches of voices from the Manchester artists Space Afrika, captures Klein’s feelings about the titular police unit established to address gun crime in African-Caribbean neighborhoods at the turn of the millennium.

“It’s this echoing, break that repeatedly interrupts the rhythm of a normal person attempting to lead a regular life,” she comments.

Surveillance, Fear, and Creative Expression

The track melts into the disturbing drone soundscape of Young, Black and Free, featuring input from a Swedish artist, member of the cult Scandinavian hip-hop group Drain Gang.

“As we were finishing the track, I understood it was rather a question,” Klein says of its title. “There was a period where I resided in this area that was constantly surveilled,” she continues. “I observed police on equestrian units daily, to the point that I recall someone remarked I was probably recording police noise [in her music]. No! Each audio was from my actual surroundings.”

Sleep With a Cane’s most striking, difficult piece, Informa, captures this relentless sense of persecution. Opening with a clip of a news broadcast about young people in the capital swapping “a life of violence” for “artistry and self-reliance”, Klein reveals legacy media platitudes by highlighting the hardship suffered by Black youths.

Through extending, looping and reworking the audio, she elongates and amplifies its short-sighted absurdity. “That in itself epitomizes how I was perceived when I first started creating stuff,” she observes, “with people employing strange coded language to allude to the reality that I’m Black, or allude to the truth that I was raised in poverty, without just stating the actual situation.”

As though expressing this frustration, Informa eventually erupts into a brilliant pearlescent swell, perhaps the most straightforwardly gorgeous moment of Klein’s body of work to date. However, seething just beneath the exterior, a menacing coda: “One's existence doesn’t flash before your eyes.”

This urgency of this daily tension is the driving force of Klein’s art, a quality rare creatives have captured so complexly. “I’m akin to an optimistic nihilist,” she declares. “Everything is going to ruin, but there are nonetheless elements that are magical.”

Dissolving Boundaries and Embracing Freedom

Klein’s consistent attempts to break down boundaries among the overwhelming variety of genre, media and influences that her output encompasses have led critics and fans to describe her as an experimental master, or an non-mainstream creator.

“How does existing completely free look to be?” Klein offers in response. “Music that is deemed traditional or ambient is set aside for the experimental events or academia, but in my head I’m like, oh hell no! This