Holodec, an electronic artist, debuts on Phantom Limb with hypnotic new album »TRU FOLK«, a subtle and environmentally sensitive documentation of everyday life through distant synthesis, interwoven field recordings, and urban haze. It's bioth,a folk record and an audio document. It draws from a 15-year archive of field recordings that capture the ordinary music of lived life: streets, parks, family gatherings, domestic sound and city noise, ranging from DTLA to Oakland to Taipei. These audio narratives form the foundation of the considerately textured representation of the same spaces that make up the record, full of earthen, grounding synthesis, semi-present melodies, and smogged-out tonal palettes. It occupies a zone somewhere between tangible and dreamlike, treating sound as »evidence of living rather than an escape from it.«

Holodec keenly places »TRU FOLK« as a continuation of folk traditions into electronic timbres. A »folk archive in audio form«, he explains. The record intentionally eschews the oft-pursued transcendentalist approach to ambient electronics that characterises music with comparable dynamics. »Rather than aspiring to aesthetic refinement or spiritual escape, »TRU FOLK« exists at street level«, Jieh writes. »It approaches sound as a vernacular practice that values what is common and human-made. The album functions as a record of presence, tracing how people live, move, and endure through shared environments. In doing so, it extends the idea of folk music into the realm of daily listening, creating a document of survival and place.«

Opening single »under heaven’s weight« leans deeply into the record’s core theme. A point taken from »TRU FOLK«’s sizable accompanying manifesto describes »everyday sound functioning both as record and memory, grounding the music in lived experience.« Surf washes over glimmering arpeggiation that flares and fractures like sunlight over waves lapping at the beach. Decaying echoes reverberate in a sky of cloudless reverie and life-giving sunrays. Passers-by play out their lives in scattered interconnectivity, sometimes in acknowledgement of each other and the scene, but usually not.

Later, »volk rays« is more ghostly, aching, and ruminative, an expression of another manifesto point: »The album emerged after a long period of personal upheaval. It was written following years of family crisis and recovery, during a time of reset and reflection.« Its spiritualist choral murmurings reflect memory and memory loss, decaying like its playback has aged over years of recall. It is uncannily familiar, but made of strange and weightless elemental ores.

»ethnograf« plays out a blurred scene of rarefied single events coalescing into one. Its synthesis is cautiously present, developing over its length as a harmonising shroud that both collects and obscures its foggy images. Moments of recognisable sound — a snippet of conversation, a clattering over a chain-link fence, footsteps, rain on a plastic roof — emerge half-illuminated through the mist, barely enough to identify them, but always in clear depiction of real life.

Holodec — real name Jieh — is a musician and producer based in LA who has been described as »a quietly gifted artist who operates inside the long shadow of late ’90s US R&B and the space where it intersects ambient, neo-classical, and the weightless bass interzones of contemporary UK club music« (Boomkat, 2023). »TRU FOLK« follows the 2022 album »All Dogs Come from Wolves«, released by Kelman Duran’s Scorpio Red label. Jieh has worked alongside such contemporaries as Main Attrakionz, Nosaj Thing, Kelman Duran, and acclaimed film composer Lim Giong.