Before her music reached art galleries and avant-garde playlists, Klein worked as a “logger” on a reality TV show—meticulously recording everything the cast did, from arguments to naps, for use in background footage. The detail sticks with you because it’s both funny and strangely fitting. That kind of obsessive cataloguing—of the ordinary, the awkward, the fleeting—runs through all of Klein’s work. In a Pitchfork interview, she talked about how easily TV narratives could be twisted by what the loggers chose to include or leave out. Klein, by contrast, puts everything in. Her music feels raw and unfiltered, full of both chaos and clarity. After two albums of blistering guitar noise, sleep with a cane feels like a retreat inward—into the soft folds of ambient music and the ambient sounds of her life: her family, her home, her street. She’s her own logger now, documenting feelings and fragments until the mundane turns transcendent.
In a HotNewHipHop interview (Klein is signed to Roc Nation), she called sleep with a cane both a “coming-of-age” work and a mixtape. It’s an apt description: the record plays like a collage of sketches, yet somehow coheres into something epic. Over 91 minutes, Klein moves from the droning, meditative sprawl of “it is what it is in d minor” to the jagged distortion of “for 6 guitar, damilola,” a devastating tribute to a murdered London schoolboy. Her range is dizzying—modern classical, post-club, drone, experimental hip-hop—yet it all sounds unmistakably hers. “Family Employment 2008–2014” and her eerie, stretched-out collaboration with Ecco2k shimmer with melancholy, while snippets like “bruk promise” or the 16-second Space Afrika “collab” dissolve into noise, static, or silence. Klein’s music often feels like it’s about to fall apart, but that tension is where its power lies. Even when she buries humor under distortion or grief inside abstraction, there’s always meaning beneath the murk.
It helps to remember two things about Klein: she’s hilarious, and she’s deliberate. Her strangest work is never weird just to be weird. “Informa,” first heard in a lecture she gave for Frankfurt’s Städelschule, loops a news line about young artists “leaving violence behind” until it becomes both critique and mantra. The repetition feels defiant—a refusal to be framed as a miracle or anomaly, as some “exceptional” Black woman making art that’s too intellectual for where she’s from. Klein isn’t performing for anyone. She’s building a world for herself and letting us peek in.
That world softens but never relaxes on sleep with a cane. The closer, “rich dad poor dad,” drifts between cloud-rap and requiem, with Klein singing, “My mum comes down and says, ‘Birds are watching’/I look around our home is burning.” Her voice trembles on the word “crossroads,” repeating it like a prayer. The crossroads might recall Robert Johnson, another artist who turned his own myth into music too personal to imitate—but Klein’s mythology is her own.
In her universe, she’s both the subject and the observer, logging every sound, every flicker of feeling, until life itself becomes art. Listening to sleep with a cane, her reality show feels less imaginary than ever.
About the Author
