Aydio is a producer based out of London who, if nothing else, seems to enjoy subverting genre formats. While one could generally class Aydio as trip hop with a little electro or tribal house, that really wouldn’t do his many-layered sound justice. His fourth full-length album, Inversion is due out tomorrow, and it’s got a lot going on.
Aydio has released two singles from Inversion so far, and both “Sonrisa” and “The Surface of Revolution” show quite well how he likes to stratify his music compositions. “Sonrisa” is essentially a tribal house beat, but it also has rock-influenced bass and guitars which float over the beat and tie it to the ambient space, which contains a lot of dream pop accents. Aydio does a lot of the instrumental work on this album with actual instruments, so while tying the analog instrumentals together with electronic drums, ambient experimental music and vocal samples can be tricky, he pulls it of in “Sonrisa” and creates a beautiful cacophony of sound which could go toe-to-toe with any bass music or experimental sound design greats. 
“The Surface of Revolution” is a little more trip hop and all-around jazzy than “Sonrisa,” but still has a healthy amount of tribal-style syncopation. Aydio also takes direct jazz cues in this track from Santana, but again the composition is almost upside down from a normal rock or pop song. It is definitely more trip hop than jazz and more electronica than rock. In this track once again, the subtle layering of the composition is expertly done annd while there’s a lot going on, all the sounds meld together and play off of each other while still having a solid trajectory. The jazz influence here can also be heard in this composition, but the sound could easily fit in a club atmosphere as well.
It’s clear that Aydio loves a number of different styles of music and he especially gives more than a nod to jazz. It’s made even more clear by his remix of Benny Goodman’s “Sing, Sing, Sing,” the video for which is below. That said, he’s modernized and taken cues from other trip hop and ambient acts like Thievery Corporation and Four Tet, utilizing electronic music to make a completely different sound from what’s come before. In this way and by his stellar composition and sound design, Aydio both pays homage to the greats of other genres while also giving them a whole new patina and, likely, a new audience.
Inversion by Aydio releases tomorrow, July 9 and is available for purchase on Amazon or Last.FM. Check his Soundcloud and Bandcamp pages or website for more streaming and purchase options, news and availability as well as his previous releases, which are also gorgeous.
