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.
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.
