At the moment, Rusko is appropriately making people go ‘OMG’. As the title of his new record, it sees a release on Mad Decent and has left Britney Spears and M.I.A alike beckoning for his input in their respective new material. His distinctive, playful dubstep palette has also seen him become the poster-boy for the genre in the states. Accordingly, the 25-year-old originally from Leeds now finds himself living in LA. However, with no disrespect to Ms. Spears whatsoever, we were interested to find out some more about his collaboration with M.I.A on /\/\/\Y/\. What we didn’t expect was for it to involve banana leaves, volcanic rock and nearly being run over by planes. Not paper planes either, before you ask.

Dazed Digital: So how did you two meet?
Rusko: Switch and Diplo really brought me in on the project. I've been friends with Switch for a while now, and my album is being released on Mad Decent [Diplo's label]. Maya and I just really vibed well in the studio and made some absolute bangers! I'm so excited for her album to be out! I'm dying to play some of her tracks in my DJ sets but they are totally off limits!

DD: What was it like working with her?
Rusko: She is super creative! Her house was just like this big creative hub. There would always be a bunch of things going on and the energy was just buzzing. I really enjoyed the experience and I think we really worked well together. She really likes to push the limits, sometimes I couldn't physically do the things she wanted to the music, it was really cool to be challenged though.
 
DD: Any funny stories to tell us?
Rusko: Maya wanted to finish up the album in Hawaii. She wanted a change of scenery, so we packed up my entire studio and went to Hana. The first day we arrived we all wanted to walk to the beach. Turns out it was way farther away than it looked and we ended up at this tiny airport. Looked abandoned really, not a person or plane in sight. It was the only thing standing on our way of the beach so we decided to run across the runway. After we got across we saw a ton of lava rock that we had to walk across but I was the only one who wore my shoes! Maya, my wife, and Aaron the engineer were in so much pain as they tried to walk across the rocks! They got half way across before Maya had the genius idea to wrap banana leaves around their feet like shoes! We got to the what we thought was the beach which actually turned out to be a cliff. we walked back to the runway and there was planes circling around us - they wouldn't land with us there and we ran like hell...

Dazed & Confused's July issue with full M.I.A coverage is out now