Wiki
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Release Date
31 December 1981
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Length
5 tracks
Originally recorded as a collection of singles and an EP, Camino Del Sol is the work of French band Antena, who made a brief impact on the electronic music scene between 1981 and 1983. Dubbed "electro-samba" by the Pet Shop Boys' Neil Tennant, the songs here (including a nearly unrecognizable reworking of Jobim's "The Girl from Ipanema") are a combination of Latin-flavored drum-machine beats and relaxed vocals over a wash of synthesized melody. What's remarkable is how up-to-the-minute these 20-year-old recordings sound - Antena may have arrived too early to become successful, but their resonance can be heard in a slew of modern bands, from Beck's Brazilian excursions to the mellow electronica of Zero 7.
Antena's Camino Del Sol was first released in September 1982 as a 5-song, 18-minute mini-LP on the elusive Brussels label, Les Disques Du Crépuscule. Antena: Camino Del Sol (Numero Group, 2004) contains re-mastered versions of the original Camino Del Sol tracks compiled along with the band's first EP, period B-sides, compilation tracks and two unreleased cuts, "Frantz" and "Ingenuous".
Antena: Camino Del Sol (NUM002)
1982, Brussels: Isabelle Antena, the former au pair for Rick Wakeman of Yes, and two of her teenage friends are at the doorstep of Les Disques Du Crépuscule to make an album with Gilles Martin. Living on busking wages and next door to Tuxedo Moon, they manage to make a contemporary bossa nova record that provides the missing link between Antônio Carlos Jobim and Kraftwerk. Antena's album would be issued and promptly forgotten, with Isabelle moving toward jazz in Asia and the others returning to France. Twenty years later, one might find it only as a VG+ LP with a sticker price of .99. Intrigued by the striking cover's patio furniture at rest in the south of France, archival record label Numero Group (founded 2003) scooped up Camino Del Sol immediately, giving it the distinction as the second record in their library (NUM002).
On June 15 2010, six years after its initial release, Numero finally issued it as a deluxe 2LP, along with the CD and MP3 versions. The original Camino Del Sol had been given back its spacious mini-LP quarters, packaged in a replica of its Benoît Hennebert-designed sleeve, while the remaining tracks (including all four songs from the "Boy from Ipanema" session, "Seaside Weekend", two Crépuscule compilation cuts, and four period outtakes) have been given their own LP, recasting this short-lived combo's forward-thinking mile-marker as a modern-day masterstroke.
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