He begins talking about which drugs he was on when making different tracks, locked away on his own in his studio bunker.
“I made ‘Opium’ entirely on Promethazine codeine syrup, which basically looks like opium in a bottle,” he shares. “I managed to score a bottle of the real lean 100% codeine syrup. The album was very inspired by the drugs I was taking while I was making it.
“One day I got Rohypnol, the date- rape drug,” he continues, apace. “I date- raped myself, and made a track — ‘Dirty Sexy Money’. I had the start, and now it’s a little bit more complex than some of the other ones. It has a few extra effects and bass noises in, and I don’t remember making most of them because I was literally Rohypnol’d up to my bollocks. It was fun! I’m at this stage now, I’m drinking a bottle of vodka a night, enjoying drugs for what they are, and not being shy about it. This album wouldn’t sound as good as it does if I wasn’t taking a fuck-load of drugs.” He says he can’t remember playing the guitar solo at the end of ‘Love You More’ either, and that rolling melancholic comedown-y album closer ‘M357’ is named after the American medical code for prescription drug Vitalin. He mentions Cypress Hill, and your hack starts telling him about going to Top Of The Pops with the hip-hop legends and them getting me so stoned that I couldn’t speak — when they hang out,
do they do that to Rusko? “Nooo, come on, who are you talking to, who are you talking to right now?” he laughs. “No way, I can fucking put them to sleep, bruv! The first day we met I matched them joint for joint, puff for puff, roll for roll, and even more. But then I have lived in California for three years now, I’m pretty used to the styles. They burn hard, but I can keep up with them.” Rusko says that he’s turned down thousands of dollars to work with pop acts, and is just all about working with Cypress and doing his own shit. He then jabbers about getting on the mic at gigs, not minding when he fucks up a mix, and how he’s gone back to just playing CDs after his laptop crashed on him when he was playing off Traktor to tens of thousands at the infamous outdoor amphitheatre Red Rocks in Colorado. “I had to do a full restart. I just got on the mic and started cracking jokes,” he says.
It’s clear that Rusko is having a ball at the moment, but does he still consider himself part of the dubstep scene? “No, not really,” he says, quiet all of a sudden. ”The dubstep scene I see as people trading tunes and making tracks together and playing gigs together, and I’m a bit of a loner, really. I’m out here on my own in my own little bubble. When
“REGGAE’S BEEN SLOW AND BASS-HEAVY SINCE THE ’60S, FUCK OFF! JUST BECAUSE
YOU MAKE SLOW AND BASS-HEAVY MUSIC DOESN’T MEAN YOU INVENTED DUBSTEP, WE SHOULD BE GIVING CREDIT TO KING TUBBY,
NOT BLOODY KORN!” RUSKO
the English DJs come over to LA, I don’t go — definitely not, no. I just live in my little bubble. I do feel a bit disconnected, but that’s a good thing I think. “I’d quite like to be ‘the dubstep Beck’, if you know what I mean?” he continues. “Just doing my own thing, not really being one thing or the other. That’s ideally what I’d like to do — no singles, no singles charts, I just want to do
albums and that’s what I’m doing from now on. “The singles process feels like I’m in a competition, and music shouldn’t be about a competition — it shouldn’t be about who’s got the best Beatport chart number or whatever. When I was trying to be a part of that, I felt like I was part of the fucking Dubstep Grand Prix. I was getting unhappy doing what I was doing by being part of the dubstep scene. I felt like I was part of the dubstep competition, not the dubstep scene. It felt like a contest, a shit-flinging contest, and if I can just be aside from that in a bubble doing my own little thing, I feel way more creative and relaxed and happier.”
www.djmag.com
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