Klein at Cafe Oto: on togetherness
By Sam Wilkins
I was intrigued to see how the South London based composer and visual artist, Klein’s individualist, patch-work approach to composition would gain dimension in live performance. Her music/noise/auditory media is a testament to incongruency, staking roots in Grime and Roc Nation, blended with looped conversations, noises, and classical music.
Preceding Klein is the London DJ, Wisteria, who meshed a transient set with slowed and reverberated remixes from Frank Ocean and Ashanti. The nostalgic music selection set the tone for a familiar and intimate Sunday evening. Her sampling of Sexyy Red and Drake’s ‘U my Everything’, with the slowed down repeating refrains of “I love you, you my everything” and “We go together, tell them hoes we go together”, created an atmosphere full of sentimentality which framed the nostalgic references in Klein’s own work.
What struck me about Klein’s performance was the feeling of togetherness; the relaxed and community focused environment of Café OTO framed it perfectly. During Wisteria’s set, Klein and her friend were wandering around the crowd chatting and dancing like audience members. When her MC introduced her, he began building an improvised and comfortable rapport, “Anyone here from North London? Anyone here from South London? Anyone here from The Cotswolds?”, conjuring up anecdotes, shooting looks to Klein in awkward anticipation of her taking over. When she finally began, she ushered the crowd to surround her until we were shoulder to shoulder. She wanted intimacy, to dissolve hierarchy between audience and artist and to deliver a deliberate presentation of her persona and the sharing of her media. Her performances and films have been selectively distributed, and despite her impressive connections and collaborations with pioneers in the art and music scene (Mica Levi, Mark Leckey, etc.) she chooses to maintain independent and unique stylism. Her profile on RA describes her as a ‘sound collagist’ and I think this is a perfect summary of her fascinating musical constructions.
As she began to play, looping crashing layers of sound on top of one another, she brought the audience in even further by recording live snippets of audience reaction and weaving these into her music. The set was lively and captivating, and the persistent strobe lighting helped intensify the trance-like sensation of her music. Although relatively short, by incorporating snippets of conversation, grime dubs, live guitar and other ambiguous crashes, Klein manifested her varied taste in all things auditory.
The closing element of the evening was the descent into the experimental realm of noise and ambient music. Brooklyn based artist La Timpa delivered a fascinating exploration of the ambient sound and noise genre. Starting with a discordant, clashy guitar and vocal performance, Timpa descended, crouching, surrounded by microphones and looping beats, eventually working his way down to the point where he was actually lying on the floor, rubbing his head and speaking and singing into the microphone, urging the already close crowd to huddle in even further.