This is part of a series, posting between 30th December 2025 and 3rd January 2026
Black Sites: R4 (Tresor)
My countdown of the top 20 best electronic music albums of 2025 continues. Although it’s not a countdown. Everything in the top 20 has equal billing. No more Number 1 Album Of The Year: music taste is more complex than that. Jeez, I sound so pretentious.
ANYWAY. This new album on legendary techno label Tresor sees an old musical partnership revived. The first half of Black Sites is analogue knob-tweaker Helena Hauff. The other half is studio big-brain Kris Jakob, better known as the impressively obtuse name F##X.
R4 is the pair’s first album proper, and the first Black Sites release since 2014. They met years ago while DJing at Hamburg’s Golden Pudel club. You can tell when a partnership is nicely embedded: the rusted gears of this album spin with unfettered ease.
It’s a corrosive and deliciously grubby musical project. Rotted industrial snares, rickety mechanical jitters, overdriven synth crunches, frequencies smashed and crunched and bleeding for their lives. Yet it’s so listenable. So, so listenable.
When I interviewed Black Sites about this album earlier last year, I was fascinated about the yin and yang of it all. As I wrote at the time, it’s a mix of crabs-in-your-pants scratchiness and party-poppin’ electro bangers.
“Haha, it’s a fine line indeed,” said Hauff at the time. “We enjoy having fun and being playful, but we both love harsh and raw sounds. But having fun can be dirty, you know.”
And that’s why R4 works. In some ways, this album is as hard as it gets, but it’s such a good time.
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