Benno Blome: From Antenna To Antenna 1
Sender

Sender, established in Cologne in 1999 by Benno Blome, houses sixty-nine releases by top-drawer names like A Guy Called Gerald, Baby Ford, and Jake Fairley in its stable, so there's never been a better time for Blome to connect the dots between seventeen vinyl-only favourites and unreleased cuts and show off the label's booty. Bloody Mary's “Emma Pt.1” opens the set in prototypical minimal mode with an airily skipping groove that achieves lift-off with the advent of Yapacc's pumping “Take This Way.” Someone Else boosts the mix's foundsound quota in “Larry's Circus,” a squirrelly slice of jacking swing issued under the And Again alias, Baby Ford and Blome douse the club with their slinky “Smoke Machine,” and Andre Crom single-handedly creates a new genre—clicks and quacks—in “Vogelgrippe.” Overlaid by inflamed speechifying by New Orleans ' mayor C. Ray Nagin, Error Error's hot-wired electro-cruiser “End of the Day” may be the disc's peak; the grooving banger that follows, Phage's “Lumberjack (Edit),” is no slouch either, and, though it arrives late, don't overlook Baby Ford's silky smooth “Messenger Vox.”

November 2007