The Bourse de Commerce – Pinault Collection presents a concert by avant-garde composer and multi-disciplinary artist Klein on the occasion of the release of hew new album Harmattan, which blends classical music, jazz, and drone. She is accompanied on stage by the artist Embaci.
Harmattan, released by the classical music label Pentatone, has been described by American cultural theoretician and poet Fred Morton as “a music of epic revolt against any beginnings and all endings”, ultimately enriching our idea of what classical music can be.
In concert, these explorations venture even further. Klein’s playful need to invent and push against boundaries take centre stage as she invites listeners into her unique soundscape. Select instruments, strange voices, and deformed sound artifacts collide with one another to create a dizzying fabric of surrealist, experimental electronica.
Klein
Klein is a composer and artist from London via Clovelly. Her music releases, films and performances have established her as a singular voice who uses disjunctive experimentalism to create a sensory world that melds popular reference points with personal associations’. Her latest project, Harmattan, is a personal journey from childhood to the present day, named for the very dry wind that blows across the Sahara and West Africa. The album begins with jazz piano improvisations and gives way to an ambient sound that transforms her clas-sical music inspirations into a unique acoustic universe..
Her catalogue of releases include: Frozen (self-released), Lifetime (ijn inc., 2019), cc (self-released, 2018), Tommy (Hyperdub, 2017), Lagata (self-released) and Only (Howling Owl, 2016). She has collaborated with the likes of Mica Levi, Caroline Polachek, Wu Tsang, Josiane M.H Pozi, Diamond Stingily, and Mark Leckey. Klein has been commissioned for performances at noteworthy art institutions such as Barbican, MoMA PS1 and Unsound festival, among others, and she has also directed the theatre musical Care (London ICA, 2018), which she turned into a full-length film in 2021.
