2026 Edition — Klein
Sunday 29 November, 6.00 pm – Sala Italo Tajo
Klein is an artist and musician whose work often blurs the lines between fact and fiction.
Her music releases, films, and performances are often informed by urban mapping, surveillance, humour, hip-hop, noise, identity, and beyond. Her work has been shown or performed at Museums, Galleries, yards, squats, and pubs, including the “infamous” venues The Old Blue Last and the New Cross Inn.
Her work challenges genre boundaries, drawing on a wide range of media and influences in an approach that has led critics to associate her with experimental music. Yet her music resists easy categorization, allowing even the most familiar elements to take on unexpected forms. In this respect, her extensive use of sampling is not simply a matter of timbral exploration, but also reflects Klein’s interest in how images, news and narratives shape our perception of reality. Political issues, identity and representation find expression in her compositions through materials that retain traces of the contexts from which they originate. The distinctive character of her work emerges precisely from the juxtaposition of these heterogeneous materials, which retain their individual qualities even within a single composition. This plurality, reflecting Klein’s DIY ethos (H. B. Jones, The Guardian, 2025), is clearly evident in the eclecticism of her discography.
2026 Edition — Klein
Sunday 29 November, 6.00 pm – Sala Italo Tajo
Following her debut album ONLY (2015) and the EP Tommy (2017), released on Hyperdub, Klein wrote, directed and starred in Care (2018), an autobiographical fantasy musical inspired by Disney imagery that explores the experiences of children in the UK care system. Commissioned by London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts, the project was later adapted into an experimental feature film of the same name, released in 2021.
With Lifetime (2019), she reworks personal memories and references to her religious upbringing through sampling, manipulated voices and experimental sounds. In mark, from the album Frozen (2020), silence becomes a compositional material in a tribute to Mark Duggan, a black man killed by London police whose death sparked riots and protests across several parts of the UK. Meanwhile, in Faith in a Minor, a track from the EP Cave in the Wind (2022), news broadcasts reporting the overturning of Roe v. Wade take centre stage, while the sonic texture unfolds around media voices, bringing the public dimension of the political event into dialogue with its emotional resonance.
In Harmattan (2021), released on Pentatone, and e touched by an angel (2023), Klein takes yet another approach, re-examining the conventions and instrumentation of classical music. Her exploration continues with the recent release of my own fairytale (2026), an album that reimagines fairy-tale imagery through a personal lens, transforming orchestral arrangements into distorted sounds and claustrophobic drones (Daniel Bromfield, Pitchfork, 2026).
