Next week, Jon Convex will release Idoru, his first solo album.

Convex is the latest production alias of Damon Kirkham, a.k.a. Kid Drama of seminal drum’n’bass group Instra:mental (whose other member, Alexander Green, now records as Boddika for labels like Swamp81). Pushing an “autonomic” sound as influenced by Autechre and Aphex Twin as it was Randall and Goldie, Instra:mental’s hardware-based, dsytopian take on drum’n’bass produced some of the genre’s finest ever singles, accumulating in the unstoppable ‘Watching You’.

‘Watching You’ was, and remains, so perfect that Instra:mental never believed that could follow it, and thus on their subsequent work, they turned to house and techno tempo, recording an often excellent debut album, Resolution 653. Since then, however, Instra:mental’s members have focused on their solo projects, and if a recent Boddika interview is anything to go by, the group’s future looks bleak.

Of course, bleak is hardly new territory to the group that wrote ‘Vicodin’, and Idoru finds Convex in sterling form, touching on Basic Channel dub-techno, pillow-talk electro and warped, rattling underground house, all bound together by allusions to a faded female subject in the album’s track titles – think the kind of unspoken narrative that exists in an album like Dopplereffekt’s Gesamtkunstwerk.

FACT will be streaming Idoru all week.