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2LP
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TRESOR 379LP
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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.
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