Via EDMunplugged 

Raymond Prince
Contributor 

He could have been bigger than The Beatles. Well, maybe not. But I can’t shake the feeling that DJ and producer Garrett Lockhart, AKA i_o, was bound for the mainstream before his passing in 2020. He sure was stealing the hearts of ravers. Mystifying and versatile, I think Lockhart should be remembered as nothing short of a visionary.

It was obvious that i_o was a cross-pollinator when he released his first single in 2017. The catchy “Oxygen” featuring producer Tommy Trash and vocalist Daisy Guttridge has one foot in shimmering trance music and another in peak-time techno. But there’s nothing inaccessible about it; it recalls the anthemic EDM of deadmau5. As Lockhart told Groove Radio, the i_o moniker “all [came] back to a groove, a beat.” His music was always elementally danceable.

Initially, i_o’s social media persona and visual identity borrowed from hacker aesthetics; error terminals and walls of green text featured in his live sets and album artwork. Early EPs like FATAL ERROR and ScriptKiddisound distinctly digital. But for my money, they have some of his most moving moments too – the trance-y breakdown halfway through “Something” is a case in point. For his punishing 2019 House of God EP, Lockhart gave up all things cyber and explored satanic imagery. To this day, the title track disturbs me like a cobwebbed attic. But it still has a cool-factor because the groove kills. By contrast, the radio-ready house tunes that dot his discography, featuring the likes of Grimes and Canadian musician Lights, conjure sprites and angels and get stuck in your head.

”Lockhart could write melodies just as well as he could shake floors.”

When you blur your eyes, and your ears if you can, i_o’s artistic vision is messy. Even his 2019-2020 trilogy of EPs (titled 444, he explained to Forbes, after a venue that inspired the project) runs the gamut from squelchy to ethereal. But can’t you tell how this had me — and the popular dance music scene — under a spell? We never knew what was coming next. What’s more, Lockhart was sensitive to the tradition of EDM; I can hear the 80s and 90s in his music and certainly 2009. It strikes me that the more dance music breaks into smaller factions, the more i_o’s music feels like a foothold.

Maybe the secret to the seduction of i_o’s music is how bare-bones his tracks are. Every hit of the kick drum feels monolithic, and the synths have the singularity of a black hole. You knew it was the new i_o track when it culminated in a shockwave. I do recall where I was when I decided to listen to “Death By Techno” for the first time: the Eaton Centre Indigo. The snare rolls suddenly stopped, and the whole track fell into silence. And then the beat dropped, and i_o blighted me with, well, death by techno. 

Garret Lockhart showed so much promise. Five years ago, his discography came to a most unfair halt. Party at your nearest bookstore in his memory.