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One of Klein’s heroes is Brandy, the first Black woman to play a Disney princess, so it’s fitting that she should present herself as the heroine of her own Cinderella story, complete with a fraught relationship with family. The South London artist describes her new ambient album, my own fairytale, as her take on a “dark Disney soundtrack,” and though the swooning strings that take up much of its real estate sound like they’re on loan from “A Dream Is a Wish,” it’s the darkness we want to know more about. It seems to be coming from inside the house.
An unusual biographical detail informs my own fairytale: Klein has claimed that her family knows nothing about her life as a vanguard experimental musician. How has she managed to keep them in the dark for so long? The life of an anonymous artist brings up further questions, not all of them logistical: What happens to the ego when all the praise is directed toward a public persona rather than the private individual whose toil and turmoil feeds the work? How does it feel to keep one of the most important parts of yourself secret from the people closest to you?
No score yet, be the first to add.
The album’s most fraught moments hint at reasons that run deeper than a simple concern for privacy. “If Mum won’t talk to me, and Dad too/Then what’s the fucking point, man?” she raps on “bridge the gap,” part of a short suite of vocal songs near the end of the record. In “man in the mirror,” she claims her sister won’t speak to her either. Klein’s Brandy/Moesha existence is clearly crucial to her work; her best song to date, one of a handful of songs to fulfill the promise of shoegaze in the 21st century, is called “Double Life.”
Some anonymous electronic musicians, like Burial or the dub-techno artists on Chain Reaction, took a step back from the spotlight in service of letting their work stand on its own. But this is an album that’s apparently about the artist’s double life, and the questions that are bound to be at the forefront of any curious listener’s mind go unaddressed.
The closest thing we get to an answer to how the artist feels about her double life can be found in the music itself, whose Disneyfied, occasionally GAS-like grandeur is streaked with ambivalence. Like Klein’s last album, the fantastic sleep with a cane, much of the album is taken up by string samples that hover in the stereo field like a low-hanging fog. The most impressive example is “siren reloaded,” a collaboration with arranger Sasha Scott and the London Sinfonietta. The rich sound of the orchestra makes for a great contrast with the intractable and drifting way Klein composes; listening without any further information, you might think you were listening to a time-stretched sample.
Yet other tracks are so crudely rendered it’s hard to imagine a reason anyone would want to listen to them without some deeper background. The four and a half minutes of opener “Forever Yours,” in which Klein seems to be rummaging through a box of cheapo instruments and blowing willy-nilly on whistles and toy harmonicas, might represent the same kind of comforting regression towards childhood required to still believe in Disney-princess fantasies as an adult. But that doesn’t make it any easier to sit through, and you might feel a little ridiculous willing your brain to reach for a context the artist is too slippery to provide.
The embrace of Bandcamp during the pandemic led to a proliferation of albums, EPs, and tapes whose intention was less to be great than to prop up an artist’s livelihood while also providing a snapshot of how they were feeling at that moment in time. These releases were often filled with field recordings and improvisations, prioritizing the glimpse into the artist’s mind over the rigors of craft. my own fairytale falls in this emo-ambient tradition, but the stakes seem much bigger than the ambivalent sketches that take up most of this album’s runtime. Listening to these dense, reticent tracks, I’m left with a feeling of being shut out—like talking to someone who obviously has something on their mind, but who would rather wait for you to guess that something’s wrong than burden you with their problems.
