Nomine Inside Nomine

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 is the much-anticipated debut album from Nomine. Released through Tempa it finds the enigmatic producer travelling beyond his acclaimed, soundsystem-demolishing 12”s to explore the deepest reaches of inner space. A reflection on the power of sound to reshape how we experience reality, it’s a remarkable, immersive soundworld of a record — delicate and contemplative, fleet-footed yet overwhelmingly forceful.

Inside Nomine feels like the culmination of these musical voyages. As a former student and lecturer of sound design andadvanced 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 halfstepriddims 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 echochamber and remoulding the air around them. The spaghetti-western freakout of ‘Dark Is The Night’, meanwhile, recallsthe haunting visual psychedelia of Alejandro Jodorowsky’s cult film El Topo. Finally, the spine-snap drum ’n’ bass ofcloser ‘Confusion’ abruptly jolts you back to the club, bruised and elated - a fitting return to physical reality at the end ofan album that takes joy in subverting it at every turn.