There are weeks where listening feels passive, and weeks where it becomes something closer to practice. This one leans toward the latter. Across continents and decades, the tracks here all circle a similar question: what does music do to us when we stop treating it as background? Whether it’s mimicking the natural world, refracting memory through digital artefacts, or dissolving the boundary between body and sound, each piece gestures toward music as ritual, something lived rather than consumed.
That sense of ritual isn’t always sacred in the traditional sense. Sometimes it’s found in the artificial glow of a chain bar, or in the anxious fragmentation of a reworked pop song, or in the collective release of a dancefloor. But the thread remains: these are moments where sound reorganises feeling, where the listener is briefly taken out of linear time. Nostalgia, performance, identity, and movement all collapse into something harder to name, but easy to recognise.
What follows moves from the Peruvian Andes to Sheffield, via bedroom producers and late-night clubs. Not a journey in any neat geographical sense, but a set of fragments that, taken together, suggest music still has the capacity to transform.
Yma Sumac – Chumbo
Our travels through Peru were full of new, but familiar sounds. From carnival music in Cusco to Bull Dances from Ch’umbiwillcas, the country is full of musical expression, indigenous ritual, and the artistic creation born from colonialism and domination. Yma Sumac is a figure who embodies these tensions both in her music and her extraordinary life.
Born in 1922 in a middle class family, Sumac (Zoila Emperatriz Chavarri Castillo on her birth certificate) moved to Lima in her early years. After singing as a young woman in Lima’s amphitheatres, she was “discovered” by Americans Walt Disney, Douglas Fairbanks Jr. and singer Grace Moore. By the time she arrived in New York in 1946, she was already being positioned less as an artist and more as a spectacle.
Signed to Capitol Records, Sumac’s recordings—often arranged by her husband Moisés Vivanco—blended Andean motifs with Hollywood orchestration, creating something that sat uneasily between authenticity and fabrication. For the next 30 years she performed throughout the states as part of the Inca Taky Trio; the Inca Princess; the Nightingale of the Andes; and was cast in multiple Hollywood films, looking to cash in on vogue exoticism. By 1960, the moment was over, and Sumac was left to barely make a living touring through Europe and the Soviet Union.
Sumac’s career exemplifies the extractive exploitation that characterises the 20th Century in Latin America. For us today, she serves as a reminder of the disposability of art in the moment, and the importance of keeping relics. For her song ‘Chuncho’ demonstrates an enduring and captivating ability to replicate the natural world. Her bass-soprano voice allowing her to imitate hummingbirds and Pumas. The song allows the listener to appreciate the entangled natural and human worlds.
OTTO – About You Now
Otto Benson’s 2020 reimagining of Sugababes’ ‘About You Now’ brings on mixed feelings. On the one hand, there is something passé about The Moment’s obsession with rekindling the aesthetic and affect of 2020s popular culture. The hyper-earnest pop-hooks a rejection of cynicism apt for the times; the yearning for the (for some) “better times” of the mid-noughties; the rejection of innovation for comfort, fodder for dopamine drained scrolls. If Mark Fisher had lived to see today, who knows what he would have thought of this cultural turn.
However, ‘About You Now’ feels different. The remix sees the ubiquitous vocals mangled over IDM-adjacent breaks and brittle, almost Autechre-like textures. The breakup anthem euphoria of the original is transformed into something fragmented and unstable; less catharsis, more intrusion. It is an antidote to the “feel-good” house party of 30-somethings in karaoke unison reminiscing their youth. And it is this dissonance that makes for an interesting listen.
Radioactive Man – Yew Got 2 Be
From the bedroom to the sweaty collective ritual. Radioactive Man’s 2024 ‘Yew Got 2 Be’ from the album Jam Out the Kicks is certainly a song to hear ‘out’. Keith Tenniswood, one half of Two Lone Swordsmen alongside the late Andrew Weatherall, has long been a custodian of UK electro’s grimier underground.
Whether it be at one of Radioactive Man’s incredible live performances, or blasted through speakers with friends/lovers/strangers, ‘Yew Got 2 Be’ is to be enjoyed and felt through movement. From pulsing analogue basslines, distorted machine drums, and a vocal hook for the ages, it is impossible not to feel optimistic. Not optimistic in a purely hedonistic sense. Rather, the simple optimism from the vocal that ‘the waste moves trouble down the drain’. Through dancing and feeling movement, we don’t reminisce. Rather, we imagine better futures.
Gia Ford – How do I Reply?
Gia Ford’s new single sees the Sheffield singer-songwriter take an existentialist turn. Her luscious vocals reflect on the point of doing what one is meant to do (for Ford is certainly meant to write), her ‘hopeless passion always crashing out’ as ‘Another song to sing into the howling wind.’ The sentiment feels familiar to anyone who finds pleasure/escape/solstice in creation. In this era of face-to-camera futility and (increasingly commented on/cliched) algorithmic masters, Ford forces us to question who art is for. Where does it go? Who controls who experiences it? Rather than looking for worldly answers, she asks:
The universe will ask me questions
But how do I reply?
She is forced to connect with the real world, and stop ‘galloping away’.
Baxter Dury – Allbarone
The title track from Baxter Dury’s 2025 album is a bruising electro-clash tune in which the South London singer reflects on loss in a particular British bar chain:
That night in Albarone, I sat in the rain
Thought about all those promises made
There’s a fragment of love left in a tattooed soul
Before I’d even met you
I booked a hotel
Featuring vocals from regular collaborator JGRREY, Allbarone sees Dury release his inner Serge Gainsbourg, both oozing wolf-whistling geezer and fragile reflection. It is this layering of Dury’s personas that makes his music so interesting and rewarding. The contradictions of his characters and cryptic impenetrable storytelling only allow the listener a small glimpse of anything interpretable. It’s hard not to write about how this approach mirrors Dury’s real-life struggle to come to terms with being the son of Ian Dury, as documented in his recent memoir. However, Dury’s music is not to be deeply read. Rather, it is to be understood as a caricature that we all can see some of ourselves in. Through the cracks in Allbarone’s bristling alpha dog we see a softer narrator, with ‘a fragment of love left in a tattooed soul’. The pretension of the italo/franco-pronunciation of Allbarone can only hide so much. We are all the dickhead crying in an overpriced chain.
That’s it for this week! Let us know what you think. And if there’s anything you want to share, think we should listen to, or get off your chest drop us a message ;) (Insta: @ritual.relic)