“Because of my mum’s band, there were always guitars and stringed instruments flying around the house when I was growing up; music was always all around me. I’ve still got a banjo at my flat, yeah I play a bit of banjo…then moved on to bass and saxophone, which I stuck to – those were the two instruments I focused on for my degree.

I studied music performance, rather than the technical side of production. I’ve never taken any classes in production. I never used to really go to my lectures at college; I used to always be in the studios using all the nice equipment. I was never really an electronic kind of person, although I am now, but I just come from playing real instruments and real music, that’s my background, really. I only started DJing to promote the music I was making – a lot of people are DJs and then they start producing; I was the other way around.”

“I used to do a lot of live producing – I’d record live instruments and putting electronic stuff in them, all sorts of things like that, from a very young age. I used to have a little drum machine when I was about 14. My mum used to go mad because I would always be on her computer – remember when your mum got her first computer and it was the most precious thing ever? It was like that. I was always on her computer once I figured out how to hook up my drum machine up and once I figured out a way to hook up my mum’s record player to it. That was the start, really.

So I’ve been producing for a long, long time – I’m the first one to say I’m not a DJ, I’m not DJ Rusko.” (laughs) “I’ve always been into electronic music, I just come from the other end. I come from dub, really. Dub is the one for me. The whole studio ethos behind dub, and making dub, is what got me into making electronic music.

If I’d grown up in London, I would’ve been into garage and all that kind of stuff – but growing up in Leeds, there isn’t any of that. It just doesn’t exist; you don’t even hear about it because there’s just so much dub and dub reggae. I miss it so much living in London now - in Leeds, most nights there’s some kind of dub soundsystem but down here there’s just not as much demand for it. I started off by making dub tunes and then Mark from Iration Steppaz started playing some of them. Iration have a shop up in Leeds, so I’d take my tunes, try them out on the system in their shop and they’d be like “do this…do that…do this…” So I’d come back with another one a few days later and talk to them about it. It was kinda like trial and error, being guided the way a little bit by those boys.

That was before dubstep was really dubstep; I was just making dub music, trying it out. I remember Digital Mystikz doing a set at Sub Dub and that was it. Dubstep was like what I was doing musically, but it was just a little bit more - made the beats a bit faster and harder…I was just dub, no step. It’s only within the two years that I’ve put a ‘step’ on the end. (laughs) I used to make hip hop and dub under the name Rusk, so I ran with Rusko for my dubstep productions.”

“I reckon we’re best when we play back to back (Caspa and Rusko). If I get booked to play a one hour set, I’ll end up playing exactly the same tunes as Caspa – we end up arguing who gets to play what! (laughs) We’ve got almost identical record bags. Plus we have a quick turnaround; all the artists on our label are knocking out tunes constantly. So your DJ box one month looks completely different the next; the turnaround of tunes is fast. That’s good, because people get bored of tunes so quickly, they’re hungry for it, they want to hear more, more, more, more…”

Rusko can be reached at www.myspace.com/ruskonfire

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Rusko On Fire