Texas-based Pushing Red, a dubstep-centric sister label to the drum-n-bass institution Warm Communications, has thus far been responsible for outside the box takes on down-tempo bass music. Its fifth release marks its first from a producer based outside the U.S.; and while the name Ruckspin has never really previously stood out (aside from a collaboration on Jack Sparrow’s masterpiece of an album last year), “Shikra” is anything but workmanlike. Quaking with pent-up energy, it’s a sleekly futuristic slab of cyber-jungle — all steel-plated beats and surging overtures — uncomfortably squashed into a dubstep template at 140 beats per minute. That means the spliced breaks and chords bunch up and spasm as they try to conform to the unfamiliar structure, and the effect is as thrilling as it is disorienting, hurtling somewhere completely unknown. It builds determinedly, cyclical percussive loops taking bits of house, garage, UK funky, and dubstep and throwing them all into something that sounds like it hit the earth in a fiery wreck.
The B-side — with Jack Sparrow returning the collaboration favor — is much more traditional, replete with Sparrow’s trademark bellowing reggae samples. The lurching halfstep beat is filled wonderfully with Sparrow’s fidgety percussive accents, and imbued with the same technological sheen that characterizes Ruckspin’s work. While it’s not quite the blinder that the A-side is, Ruckspin’s debut for Pushing Red is the first step in establishing a promising aesthetic for a producer who has spent years toiling in the dubstep doldrums.
