LA electronic artist Holodec debuts on Phantom Limb with hypnotic new album TRU FOLK, a subtle and environmentally sensitive documentation of everyday life for distant synthesis, interwoven field recordings, and urban haze.

Described as “both a folk record and an audio document” by Holodec - aka West Coast producer Jieh - TRU FOLK draws from 15 years of field recordings that capture a range of environments from city life to the domestic everyday. 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, semipresent 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 humanmade. 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.”