Black Sites

On June 27, 2025, a long-dormant signal reactivates from Hamburg’s hidden places: Helena Hauff and F#X return as Black Sites with R4 on Tresor Records — their first full-length album and the first release under the moniker since 2014. Like a hieroglyphic recently discovered and translated, R4 feels more like a long-awaited resumption than a comeback.

Recorded to tape with minimal editing or post-production, the record is a classic example of the symbiotic relationship that can emerge from the interaction of human and machine. This punk ethos isn’t invoked through distortion alone, but through method: the album breaks from the received wisdom that hardness must be tethered to speed — most of the tougher pieces are lower BPM, and vice versa (with one notable exception in the mind-melting stomp of BLOKK).

Across ten tracks, Black Sites traverse a landscape where genre dissolves into intention. The album migrates through electro’s danceability, acid house’s corrosion, and into the liminal realm of machine funk — a genre coined by Andrew Weatherall, which sounds like the result of technology dreaming of soul. The emphasis is on live execution, on immediacy over perfection — a sound forged in the act of creating, not polishing.

In a 2013 interview, around the time of the first Black Sites EP, Hauff said she wants “things to fit together properly, but on another level, I really want them to make sense together.” That principle animates R4: the album’s form reveals itself in time, with each movement echoing and amplifying the others to create a synergistic whole.

From the opening crawl of C4 (a name that, like the music, foreshadows the explosions to come) to the end-of-the-night bliss of MOTHERJAM, via the intense peaks of BLOKK, 707, and the classic acid track 3D, it’s clear that R4 is a work made with serious intent — a refutation of a world where streaming has made the two-minute single the dominant musical form again. R4 demands immersion, not just attention. It is not a collection of tracks, but a singular, recursive experience: a mirror in which sound and listener repeatedly rediscover one another.