A veteran of UK electronic music operating incognito, by the time of Nomine’s debut release in 2012 he had already established the defining hallmarks of his sound — an atmosphere of mingled dread and blissful calm, pulpy Eastern melodies and tidal waves of sub-bass. Deep and meditative yet murder on a soundsystem, his tracks were vital firepower for a rejuvenated dubstep scene, and become regular secret weapons in figurehead Youngsta’s record bag. This led to a string of 12”s on Tempa, which over the last few years have refined and expanded his aesthetic, keeping dubstep’s bass ’n’ space ethos at their core while pushing far beyond its structural limits.

Inside Nomine feels like the culmination of these musical voyages. As a former student and lecturer of sound design and advanced music technology, his debut album brims with fascination at the psychologically affecting qualities of sound. Although still sonically kindred to dubstep, it occupies a genuinely self-defined musical space, where oceanic halfstep riddims like ‘Shockwaves’ and ‘Zen Force’ collide with the thrillingly exploratory broken techno of ‘Stickman’ and ‘Menacer’. Elsewhere he leaves any notions of the dancefloor behind entirely: the eerie voiceover of ‘Nomine’s Ego’ coils through free space amid gorgeous striplit harmonies and airlock hiss.

At the album’s heart is Nomine’s astonishing command of space and atmosphere. On ‘Blind Man’ and ‘Reticent Shadow’ he matches simmering martial arts movie dialogue with music that bristles with Zen-like discipline and focus, while ‘84600’ and ‘Hide & Seek’ wield silence like a weapon, dropping pinprick melodies and percussion into the echo chamber and remoulding the air around them. The spaghetti-western freakout of ‘Dark Is The Night’, meanwhile, recalls the haunting visual psychedelia of Alejandro Jodorowsky’s cult film El Topo. Finally, the spine-snap drum ’n’ bass of closer ‘Confusion’ abruptly jolts you back to the club, bruised and elated - a fitting return to physical reality at the end of an album that takes joy in subverting it at every turn.