With a voice which blooms exquisitely from siren-like whisper to demi-devilish rasp, Lou Rhodes is, for many, the unsung vocalist of our age.

She is also inextricably associated with Lamb, the Mancunian duo who were forerunners in the move towards more song-orientated drum 'n' bass.

With partner Andy Barlow, she created three groundbreaking albums which combined technical complexity and genre clashes with a large dollop of tunefulness, Rhodes hanging the joy and anguish of modern love from the crags of Barlow's subterranean breakbeats.

Then, following the release of 2004's disappointingly bland Between Darkness And Wonder, they decided to split.

"There's often a temptation to cling on to what you know but I'm not really of that persuasion," says Rhodes.

"When you do something for a long time you start to feel like you're going through the motions, and Lamb was never a project which would work with that. It had to be cutting edge. Lamb had to be fresh."

Having grown up on the folk scene, Rhodes had embarked on her own career with the precise intention of "messing up my songs, which were in a sense very traditional, with beats and all the new stuff that was happening".

It was this which drew her to Barlow - projects with others had failed because they'd been "too polite with my songs, just putting nice strings over them", whereas Barlow, from the off, was "very strong willed, a cheeky little sod".

One side thrived off experimentation and complexity, the other off modesty and simplicity. "Lamb was like a battleground," she says "and I think we both fed off that for quite a long time."

Come 2004, however, Rhodes had had enough. Her seven-year relationship with the father of her children was also breaking down and she realised she "didn't want to struggle any more", in any aspect of her life.

So she gave up her four-bedroom house in London, gave up Lamb and set off in a van with her two children, eventually coming to rest at a small commune in Surrey.

It was here she recorded her solo album Beloved One which, despite being the result of what her press release nauseatingly terms her "transcendental journey through the peaks and valleys of self-discovery", is utterly wonderful.

Luminous and direct where Lamb were dark and convoluted, it replaces the synths and sequencers with hand drums and Tuvan guitar.

But it makes the same strange shapes as their most compelling work, full of unexpected pauses and climaxes. "I think it was easy for people to assume Andy brought all the edge to what we did," Rhodes agrees, "but I'm not happy with things being just nice. I need them to be a little bit out there. I can't really live in shades of grey - I'm one extreme or another really."

There's another similarity, too, of course. Imbued with a new spiritual intensity but with no less a handle on heartache, Rhodes is still writing, intensely and exclusively, about the humbling power of love.

"I certainly am by no means a Christian and I don't even know whether I believe in God, but I just get this feeling there's nothing greater than love," she says.

"I don't think I'll ever tire of exploring it and I've started to feel over the past year or so that maybe that's what I'm here to do, even though I don't quite know what that means in itself.

"I could definitely be called guilty of being a little obsessive and a bit self-indulgent at times. But the world has enough cynical indie pop."