i_o

i_o was the recording name of American DJ and producer Garrett Falls Lockhart, born 16 May 1990 in Richmond, Virginia. He attended St. Stephen's Episcopal School in Austin, Texas, performed as GLock through his George Washington University years (2009–2013), then relocated to Los Angeles to attend the Icon Collective music production school and released between 2013 and 2017 under the Fawks alias on Ministry of Sound and Ultra Music. The i_o moniker debuted in December 2017 on mau5trap's "We Are Friends, Vol. 7" compilation with the track "Warning", quickly followed by the Tommy Trash collaboration "Oxygen" the same month. The mau5trap catalogue from there ran at high cadence — the "Analog//DDoS" EP (February 2018), the "Rootkit" EP (May 2018, including "Audio Dust" and "PassiveX"), "Fatal Error" (August 2018), "Low" (November 2018), then "Death by Techno" (May 2019) and "House of God" (August 2019) — before the project reached its definitive form with the three-part "444" EP series: "ACID 444" (November 2019), "NRG 444" (February 2020) and "AM 444" (May 2020), each containing four tracks and named after an obscure New York underground venue. Lockhart's collaboration with Grimes, "Violence", was released in 2019 on her album "Miss Anthropocene" and peaked at #19 on the Billboard Dance/Electronic Songs chart in March 2020. In August 2020 he signed exclusively to Armada Music — debuting with the two-part single "In My Head" and launching his own Label 444 imprint as a home for darker material — and released "Révolution" the same month before his sudden death on 23 November 2020 from a fatal arrhythmia caused by late-stage Hashimoto's thyroiditis, aged 30. The posthumous album "Warehouse Summer" with Lights followed on Armada Music in November 2022. Within the trance ecosystem i_o sits at the techno-trance border — closer to the mau5trap / HI-LO acid-techno register than to either the FSOE 138 mainline or the Anjunabeats progressive school, but with melodic-content moves that anticipated the techno-trance crossover register the early-2020s mainstage circuit (Maddix, Indira Paganotto, Anyma) would later adopt at scale.