There is a quiet but determined counter-movement happening at the edges of electronic music culture, and it goes by the name of Relics. Created by the collective known as Cybe, Relics are physical media objects that defy easy categorisation. Part release format, part artefact, part narrative universe, they exist to do something the streaming era has largely abandoned: make the discovery of music, film, and experimental media feel like an event again. Each Relic is a tangible, evolving object you can hold, collect, and return to, carrying characters, backstories, and a broader fictional lore that rewards the curious. Some carry secrets embedded so deeply that people stumble upon them entirely by accident, which is arguably the most thrilling kind of discovery there is.
What separates Relics from other attempts to romanticise physical formats is the density of what sits alongside the music itself. Comics, puzzles, alternate reality games, scriptures, and layered world-building are all woven into individual releases, meaning that buying a Relic is less like purchasing an album and more like being handed a door into something larger. To add further dimension, multiple illustrators are often brought in to create hand-drawn, three-of-three limited artworks for the same release, making each object genuinely singular. No two collections end up the same, and that personalisation feels radical in a landscape that has spent two decades flattening music into an endless, identical scroll.
Cybe‘s ethics are as distinctive as the format itself. The collective has walked away from Spotify and stated clearly they will not work with any distribution model that demonstrably harms artists. More significantly, they have committed to giving visual artists and release designers a perpetual royalty cut, treating them as genuine creative partners in a release rather than contractors paid once and forgotten. It is a position that challenges the entire economic logic of how music is packaged and sold, and one the wider industry would do well to take seriously. Alongside this, Cybe have built their Cyberneuro community across Discord and social platforms as a free, permanently open collective learning space where people collaborate in real time with no paywall and no gatekeeping.
You can see the full story of how Relics came to exist in the launch documentary, I’m Cybe, which traces the origins of the project and the philosophy driving it forward. For anyone who has ever felt that music deserved more than a thumbnail and a stream count, it is well worth your time.
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