R4

by Black Sites

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  • Record/Vinyl + Digital Album

    - 2LP black vinyl
    - full printed Pantone color sleeve
    - artwork by Martha Jokiel
    - incl. download code

    Includes unlimited streaming of R4 via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
    Download available in 24-bit/48kHz.
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    Purchasable with gift card

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  • Shirt

    - 100% cotton
    - 200 gsm
    - back and front blue puff print⁠
    - fits true to size⁠
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  • Cassette + Digital Album

    - limited edition cassette⁠
    - artwork by Martha Jokiel

    Includes unlimited streaming of R4 via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
    Download available in 24-bit/48kHz.
    ships out within 3 days
    7 remaining
    Purchasable with gift card

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  • Black Sites Bundle

    - 2LP black vinyl⁠
    - full printed special color sleeve
    - artwork by Martha Jokiel
    +⁠
    - 100% cotton
    - 200 gsm
    - back and front blue puff print⁠
    - fits true to size⁠
    +⁠
    - limited edition cassette⁠
    - artwork by Martha Jokiel

    Sold Out

1.
C4 04:51 video
2.
BOXX 04:36
3.
BLOKK 06:05
4.
FLIKK 06:50
5.
3D 06:19
6.
707 07:08
7.
II 05:31
8.
SKKETCH 01:58
9.
UURWERK 04:11
10.
MOTHERJAM 08:55

about

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 come from the interaction of human and machine. This punk ethos isn’t invoked through distortion alone, but through method; in the album’s breaking from the received wisdom of hardness tethered to speed as 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. It 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 results of technology dreaming of soul where 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 was quoted as saying that 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 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.

credits

released June 27, 2025

Written and produced by Helena Hauff & Kris Jakob, 2012-2025.
Mastered by Mike Grinser at Manmade Mastering.
Artwork by Martha Jokiel.
(P)&(C) 2025 Tresor Records GmbH.

All trademarks and logos are protected. All Rights reserved. Unauthorized copying, public performance, broadcasting of the record prohibited.

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Tresor Records Berlin, Germany

When Tresor opened on March 13th 1991 in a shack on Potsdamer Platz, beneath which the vault of the Wertheim department store lay, no one would have thought that from there would arise an institution that one day would celebrate 34 years of existence.

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