Truth be told, I’m having kind of a shitty week, to put it mildly. A lot of bad stuff has gone down. I’m mean, I’m not going to get into the details (even if I usually jump at the chance to do that sort of thing). I just wanted to paint an image, and the image is of me, slouched down in my office chair with my headphones on, stressed the hell out and doing my best to ignore/avoid my coworkers, even though very little of the stress actually has to do with work. I’m on my fourth cup of coffee and just as many cigarettes, and it’s not even 4pm yet. There’s a headache too. That’s probably my fault.

I’m not here to bitch and whine, though. I’m just saying, maybe some of you are having a shitty day too. Personally, when times get tough, all I can do is lose myself in a stack of records. So it’s really the least I can do to give you what’s been getting me through my day.

Antena was actually a short-lived French eletro-samba group from the 1980s. The reason most people talk about them now was the Joakim remix of the 1983 Antena un-classic “Camino Del Sol”, that came out last year. That remix was a house-tinged electro-bomb, and I don’t mean “bomb” in a negative sense; I mean it was blowing up dancefloors in clubs around the globe for the better part of a year. God knows, I had some amazing nights out that culminated in sweating myself to the point of dehydration thanks to that track.

Anyway, I never really got around to playing much of the flip-side, a remix by of the same song done by Todd Terje. While the Joakim remix completely remade the song into something it never tried to be but worked well as, the Terje mix is a little more subtle take on the original, which is what I’m listening to today. Maybe I just like it more because I’ve only been hearing the Joakim version for so long. God, those melodies are gorgeous though.

Actually, it was the original song that inspired this post, though I’ll be posting the Terje mix. It’s hard to find the right song to listen to on a shitty day in the middle of a shitty week, especially when you’re at work when you’re rather be sitting under a tree in a park somewhere or something, getting your head together. But I was listening to Antena’s “Camino Del Sol” while looking at old pictures of last year’s Winter Music Conference in Miami, the parties and the sand and lifeguard huts I used to hang out in on days I didn’t have much else to do but bum around the beach and listen to music. I put on that song this morning and something just seemed right. It was mellow and calming without being pensive and depressing. It felt tropical without ever being too “over-the-top”. And it has those sexy, trashy 60s female French pop vocals, only in sung in Spanish. Just a nice tune that’ll make you feel like you can close your eyes and just float over whatever’s been bringing you down, or will at least space you out for the last few hours of an uneventful workday.

So here’s the Todd Terje take on Isabelle Antena’s “Camino Del Sol”, a song that will hopefully help the rest of the day blow by like the warm, tropical breeze I’m imagining in my head right now.

Camino_Del_Sol_Todd_Terje_Remix.mp3
(download Antena’s “Camino Del Sol (Todd Terje Remix)”)

And because I have it on hand, and I don’t have the original on hand, I’ll include that “Now For Something Completely Different” remix by Joakim. Listen to the first one if you’re feeling mellow, the second one if you feel like spacing out into some electronica, dancing, and/or doing some drugs. Not that I condone that sort of thing. Really.

camino_del_sol_joakim_remix.mp3
(download Antena’s “Camino Del Sol (Joakim Remix)”)

If I can dig up the original when I get home, I’ll put it up in here too. Until then, hope you enjoy some Antena.