Across just five years of recorded output, south London outsider-composer Klein has journeyed from oblique, downer electronica redolent of Burial to a unique and singular warping of classical tropes. Befitting an artist who has released music on both cutting-edge dance labels and legacy European classical imprints, ahead of a milestone show at London’s Barbican next week Klein is performing at a club space in a Salford industrial estate.
The first sounds you hear – under pulverising strobe lights – is the clattering club rhythms of Klein’s work performed by a lone percussionist hitting a large kick drum at the side of the stage. Reflecting Klein’s direction of travel, sounds that were once sampled are now far more likely to be organic; last year’s critically acclaimed album Harmattan had been composed for orchestra before the pandemic intervened.
Suspended from the ceiling, a single microphone swings across the dark stage, and when Klein uses it to capture her trumpet playing, thick swathes of echo and digital treatment render it startling in its grandeur and scale. If her recent wordless and beatless music toys with the conventions of classical music, then that’s the only thing conventional about tonight.
In one of the hour set’s initially stranger moments, a performer introduced as Josie – and friend of Klein – is telling a rambling, surreal joke about a snail appearing on Pimp My Ride. It’s bewildering, before the joke’s awkward payoff is suddenly looped and transformed by Klein – one of the set’s serious highlights as the strange joke echoes, now unrecognisable, around the club for minutes. “How about them jokes!” grins the composer, dressed in an oversized T-shirt and thick knotted tie.
Though Klein has rejected the tag of sound collagist, she has an evocative way with fragments, deploying them in sudden changes that can make you feel like you’ve fallen down a trap door. Stretches of celestial ambient or found speech collapse unexpectedly into beer-rattling drone. Klein grabs the swinging mic and begins MCing, which itself dissolves into some of Harmattan’s most straightforwardly pretty textures. It’s abstract but compelling; expectations remain a plaything for one of the UK’s most iconoclastic auteurs of sound.
Klein is at Barbican, London, on 30 January.
