sleep with a cane

Klein used to work as a “logger” on a reality TV show, where she would record what cast members were doing in excruciating detail for use in B-roll shots. It’s a detail I can’t get out of my head, because not only is it hilarious, but there’s also something obsessive and mundane about it: Here’s one guy going to sleep, here’s another person starting an argument. In an interview with Pitchfork, Klein noted how easily TV can be manipulated by people willing to distort the narrative, as when her fellow loggers would exclude activities by certain actors to make them look bad.

An Interview With Klein About Road Rap, Grime, Reality TV, and Whatever Else

Klein is the complete opposite. She puts everything out as it comes, raw and unfiltered. It’s obsessive and mundane in a different way, suffused with meaning even at its most impenetrable. After two albums of searing guitar noise, sleep with a cane feels like a retreat into the shroud of her earlier work. She finds solace, and intrigue, in the billowing folds of ambient music, but also in the sounds around her: her family, her house, the street. She’s her own logger, cataloguing moods and feelings with a comprehensiveness that would be exhausting if it weren’t so compelling.

In a quote to HotNewHipHop (she is signed to Roc Nation, after all), Klein calls sleep with a cane a “coming of age” release, and also a mixtape. It’s a mixtape in the sense that it’s not meant as a cohesive album, rather a grab bag of assorted goodies that amounts to “an epic ambient tape,” also her words. The irony is that in its patient, almost tender 91-minute sprawl, sleep with a cane is actually one of her more well-rounded and definitive releases. There is an epic scope to tracks like “it is what it is in d minor,” a 13-minute drone track based around a distant piano that sounds like an exploded version of her modern classical suite Harmattan.

Klein’s musical world has always been porous, as she flits from modern classical to post-club to drone and whatever you call her On the Radar freestyle, where she Auto-Tune raps about “mini-mes” and staying at the bottom, before a guitar break marries the stabby freeform spray of late-’60s Neil Young solos with the buzzsaw tones of early ’90s Darkthrone. The longer tracks on sleep with a cane, like the despondent and searching “Family Employment 2008-2014” or the 10-minute Ecco2k collaboration that reminds me of a ketted-out version of the “Justin Bieber 800% Slower” video, are broken up by bits of distortion or periodic crawls into hidey-holes. “bruk promise” sounds like a microphone caught in a dust storm, and some fetchingly weird guitar playing is broken up by what could be fireworks or gunshots on the desolate “for 6 guitar, damilola.” It’s a tribute to a murdered London schoolboy that feels both devastating and obtuse, in classic Klein fashion. A promised collab with Manchester ambient stars Space Afrika manifests as a 16-second snippet with some unintelligible dialogue, while “score for J” has some Springsteenian harmonica, mournful and anthemic, undergirding a track that barely holds itself together. It’s a lot at once, but it makes a weird sort of sense in Klein’s world, blurring humor, absurdity, and grief in a way that feels like the exact opposite of irony.

Listening to sometimes impenetrable records like sleep with a cane, it’s important to remember two things about Klein: One, she’s funny as hell. Second, her music always means something. It’s never weird for the sake of being weird. “Informa,” one of the album’s most unnerving tracks, originally appeared as part of an entertaining online lecture that Klein gave for Frankfurt’s Städelschule; the track wrestles with a line from a news broadcast about young artists who are “leaving violence behind” for “creativity and independence,” with a belligerent repetition that borders on the Bluntian. Klein chose the quote as a means to address how people often see her as some sort of diamond in the rough, an exceptional case, as a young Black woman from South London making a style of music more associated with academic institutions than anything closer to what she grew up on.

But it doesn’t feel like she’s making music for anyone but herself, and it’s an immense privilege to hear it. With her fiery guitar largely relegated to the background, sleep with a cane is a softer release, but it’s hardly relaxing. It closes with “rich dad poor dad,” the closest thing here to hip-hop, mainly because it has intelligible lyrics. The instrumental sounds like a cloud-rap production blown to smithereens and slowed to a crawl, with Klein’s vocal wobbling over top: “My mum comes down and says, ‘Birds are watching’/I look around our home is burning/Another gone/Another dying,” she says, voice breaking on the word “crossroads,” repeated like a hymn.

Is the crossroads of “rich dad poor dad” meant to evoke the crossroads of Robert Johnson, another artist who bared his soul on records that seemed made for his own personal universe, logging his own actions and obsessions for the rest of the world to see? I’m not sure it matters. It’s hard to compare Klein to anyone else at this point. She’s the lead in her own imaginary reality show, where a genius making strange, unstructured music becomes a superstar beloved by people from all backgrounds. Listening to sleep with a cane, that scenario doesn’t seem so made-up.