London-based Klein has released a remarkable range of albums, blending classical, jazz, R&B, ambient, and noise influences. Her recent outings, including Thirteen Sense from earlier this year and 2024’s Marked, delved into guitar-driven glitchscapes, exploring areas touched on by other drone practitioners, though perhaps with greater attention to dynamics and movement.
While Kali Malone, for example (as well as Sunn O))) to a degree), tends to be singularly focused, as if engaged with a sonic mantra, Klein leans toward ‘open awareness’ – drawing from the ever-changing content and tone of a given context. She studies the nature of impermanence, capturing how emotions, musings, and responses to memory are part of an ever-changing stream, the fluxive and unstable intersection of consciousness and phenomena.
With her latest release, sleep with a cane, she’s at her most ‘open’. The 12-plus-minute “it is what it is in d minor” contains shifts in tone and melody, delicate tremors, waves of static, and synthy threads. Mark Fisher’s discussion of hauntology vis-à-vis Burial comes to mind. Klein, though, isn’t referencing nostalgia for what never happened, but, rather, responding to what did, while acknowledging that reinvention is inevitable. As neurologists and memoirists have asserted for decades, recollection is literally an act of re-collecting.
The eight-minute “Family Employment 2008-2014” is equally nuanced, evoking familial wellbeing and low-key terror (i.e., unbelonging/being the existential exile). High- and low-pitched synth lines are accented by dashes and dabs of static. Ethel Cain’s Perverts is a helpful comparison, though the artists’ intentions (and executions) are quite divergent. Perverts is weightier, incanting personal and cultural burden, oppression, trauma. What ensues is a psychological and sociopolitical volatility. For the most part agitative uncertainty is sustained, though semi-catharses are occasionally extended. sleep with a cane, meanwhile, aspires to equanimity, Klein endeavoring to document a state in its purest and least interpreted form. While both artists may be romantics, Klein distrusts confessionalism while Cain exemplifies it.
The album’s shorter pieces explore contrasts more overtly. “for 6 guitar, damilola” interweaves truncated phrases and fractured melodic lines, an open panorama punctuated by gunshot-type eruptions. “bruk promise” is a study in crescendos, Klein stoking raw ideas into full-bloomed tensions, these tensions, in turn, imploding or dissolving into an underlying emptiness, the process then beginning again. With “ilovelive(2012)”, Klein juxtaposes what sounds like a muted singing bowl or xylophone with a warbly synth line and various crashes, vocal utterances, and static outbursts. The piece arouses unrest as much as excitement, anxiety as much as eagerness, and inspiration as much as ennui.
“young, black and free ft Ecco 2K” is the album’s penultimate track and contributes to the project’s memorable finish. Melodic lines, rhythmic suggestions. Alternately frightening and reassuring embellishments. Whistling wind and seismic/cosmic events. Eternity and right now, the 13.8-billion year-old cosmos and the perception at hand: someone yelling from the other side of the house, a dog barking across the street. Mega movements, epic arcs, the sublimity of time, the uniqueness of a single moment.
With sleep with a cane, Klein pivots from the glitch and drone of previous forays to tracks that are largely fluid and notably mutable. If she previously plumbed the incendiary and confrontive, here she works more with the euphonic and integrative. Prompted by a sophisticated aesthetic, Klein accesses new levels of rigor, furthering a distinctly humanitarian vision.
