Klein, Kristen Gallerneaux

To call Klein’s approach multidisciplinary falls short. It is omnidisciplinary. Whether it’s her feature film debut Care, her visual art such as, most recently, her recent group show with the likes of Arthur Jafa, Christelle Oyiri at Gladstone Gallery, New York, her numerous web design projects or her work in the field of film and sound , everything is constantly woven together and interweaves with each other. As a composer, Klein, with radical consistency, also brings together elements from Classical Music, Drone, Noise to rap with avant-garde methods and forms inspired by her own take on Pop Culture and Hip Hop as a whole. For her 2021 album Harmattan, she became a one-person orchestra, recording everything from piano to string instruments and saxophone on her own. And live? Consequently, anything can happen. For her live performance at HKW she employs two channel videos entitled people's champ which feature original drawings, an essay, a series of non fiction commercials and a mini play with the artist La Timpa acting as the interlude host alongside Klein.

As a filmmaker, curator and sound researcher, not to mention a musician, Kristen Gallerneaux engages in a kind of productive spectral analysis exploring the ghostly traces inscribed in media. Her debut album Strung Figures reflects on the string games used by Indigenous peoples of North America for narrative purposes and passing on knowledge. Rhythmically, it moves between electronic pop and club music, but counters this with manipulated field recordings and samples, synthetic sounds and noisy sonic textures that give the music an eerie character. The album thus follows in the tradition of her previous musical works for film and radio, but also ties in with her monograph High Static, Dead Lines: Sonic Spectres & the Object Hereafter.