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This week's Beatport Featured Releases: new releases from Booka Shade, Milton Channels, Luomo, Omar S, Speedy J, Tim Deluxe, Silent Servant, Soul Minority, Motorcitysoul, Project FNP and VA compilation from Minus.

Booka Shade - Sweet Lies [Get Physical Music]

Having spent the year (if not most of this decade!) tirelessly touring the globe, Booka Shade return with ‘Sweet Lies’- the third single to be taken from their acclaimed third album, The Sun & The Neon Light.
At its core, ‘Sweet Lies’ is an emotive, slightly melancholic song about escaping real life by getting lost in nightlife. Booka Shade’s ‘Easy Way Out’ mix is one long, compelling reason to do exactly that: a classic piece of sultry, dramatic electronic house, replete with the soaring melodies, deep synth textures and attention to detail that we’ve come to associate with Booka. Arno and Walter once again prove themselves to be master storytellers, spinning a musical narrative that engages brain and body alike.
Patrice Bäumel, whose Get Physical single ‘Roar’ has been one of the year’s biggest club tracks, furnishes his label bosses with a thrilling remix that aims for the dancefloor but also celebrates the song-form at the heart of ‘Sweet Lies’. A heavy 4x4 pulse and delicate, twinkling synth vamp set the scene before Bäumel drops Walter’s full vocal amid the swelling waves of a deep, euphoric breakdown. The results are simply magical. Meanwhile, Moon Harbour boss Matthias Tanzmann offers a tough, percussive techno re-work of ‘Sweet Lies’, taking minimal elements from the original track and massaging them into maximum effect.
Booka Shade’s ‘Bitter Truth’ mix is an altogether darker reimagining of ‘Sweet Lies’ than the ‘Easy Way Out’ version. A menacing but nonetheless enticing, seductive synth melody bends in and out of focus, set against crunching, crowd-moving chords and snippeted, teasing vocal fragments. Full of sonic detail, it reminds us that Booka Shade are as adept as producing precision-tooled club tracks as they are song-based anthems.
Whichever way you look it, whichever mix you favour, ‘Sweet Lies’ is headed for a dancefloor near you. And that’s the truth.

Milton Channels - You Lose Remixes [Muzik X Press]

Luomo - Convivial (Instrumental) [Huume Recordings]

Sasu Ripatti is the producer and head writer behind the project Luomo, his musical outfit that has redrawn the very boundaries of what "house music" can achieve.
Always a shy man, Ripatti returns into view to introduce to the world "Convivial"; his latest, and fourth, album as Luomo.
For his relief though, this time he doesn't have to arrive alone. In addition to a long-time collaborator Johanna Iivanainen (From Helsinki, Finland), this time he lands with a semi-underground star cast; Cassy (Panorama Bar), Sascha Ring (Apparat), Jake Shears (Scissor Sisters), Robert Owens, Sue-C and one anonymous singer who hides behind a name Chubbs.
The album in question is not so much of an assembly as a series of commentaries, interspersed with contemporaneous studio stylings and entries from travel diaries he kept while working on the album.
It is for the first time that there's a real collaboration between him and the singers; where he didn't write all the lyrics himself but left sometimes plenty of room for the collaborators to bring in the lyrics and musical ideas.
The title refers to rather convivial vibe and social atmosphere that surrounded the making-of the album; something new in Luomo's production history.
The main hub to record and create the album was again Berlin as is in so many cases today, but since then the artist has decided to relocate to his home country, Finland, where he finished the album and is currently living.
While beginning the production for "Convivial" Ripatti went back to recall thinking how fascinating and strange it was when he first begun making his version of Luomo's dance music, and how difficult it has sometimes been since then while trying to search for more and newer ways to lay down the seemingly simple formula of so-called house music.
With "Convivial" he wanted let go off the structures and rules, as well as the pressures and aims as to what one should create and instead just took a moment to enjoy making the kind of music he felt strongly about. Often together with other people.
The network of artists and singers he worked with for the album bring about strong song characteristics and wide range of electronic music to experience.
Cassy is participating on a dancefloor-friendly song "Have You Ever", while Sascha Ring makes a touching appearance singing a semi-ballad "Love You All".
Jake Shears does add a piece of glamour in "If I Can't" while a long-time friend from California, Sue-C does great lead vocals in "Nothing Goes Away", a song probably everyone can relate to.
Classic house vocalist Robert Owens gets treated and processed in soulful "Robert's Reason", while Johanna Iivanainen both brings back and takes further than before what vocals can do in experimental pop music.
As always in his productions the vocals rarely speak out on narrow or specific issues, preferring sweeping hyperbolic statements all about seasonless emotions and about transition and exchange, because that is what people have in their lives, and it is his wish to reflect on that in his music.
Aside from great production, the charm of listening to Luomo's music lies in his ability to put people at ease even when he doesn't share a common language or theme with them, with vocals becoming like instruments among synthesizers, effects and other machines.
For some people he might be irreverent for his lack of deep knowledge of house or club music and its history or how he creates his own style effortlessly mixing things up, as though he is willing to embody for the new world all the traits they so eagerly use to stereotype the old world: sensuality, knowingness, an alluring combination of earthiness and high culture.
But avoiding the genre-licking is almost meaningless as these days the dynamics have changed anyway and the fusion is about.
More than anything, his kafkaesque productions come with wonderful petulance about it bringing in more depth and certainly growing the meaning of the dance music in bigger picture.
His medium as Luomo is a little bit canned but also equally sincere. Indeed, if the lines sometimes sound vaguely pre-packaged, it's mostly because Sasu Ripatti, 31, has been proselytising like this for a decade now, jumping back and forth electronic and experimental works and each time he comes back to making Luomo productions he has no guilt going all the way to the medium he sees for him to explore; pop and everything it carries around.
He is nothing less than a great tragedian, holding a mirror before a music society that sometimes would like to hear less stories.
Nevertheless he finds the dance music medium most suitable for his pop explorations, which makes sense when you consider his heavy-hitting resume in the electronic and experimental music mediums.
He resists pigeonholing and is against market fundamentalism but still loves to cross over to pop worlds.
For him the fear is never an option and somewhat through all that he has a remarkable ability to endure, with a respectable and wide-ranging catalogue of unique no-frills releases, with "Convivial" certainly being no exception.

Omar S - Collected [FXHE Records]

Various Artists collection taken from the underground and eclectic FXHE Records catalog from Detroit.  Copyright 2008 FXHE Records.  www.omarsdetroit.us

Techno:

Speedy J - Red Shift EP [Electric Deluxe]

First release on speedy j's new label electric deluxe.

Tim Deluxe - Jack It / Mud Pod [Skint Records]

First new material for Tim Deluxe for a while two massive club banger with full support from the likes of Danny Tenaglia / Tom Groove Armada / Ashley Beedle / Meat Katie / Cagedbaby /Paul Woolford

Silent Servant - Violencia [Sandwell District]

This is the new remastered version. Please replace the versions already up on Beatport with this one.

VA - Sounds From Can Elles [Minus]

This release is special because when Rich was asked to do the DJ Mag covermount CD he thought it would be a great idea to do the opposite that everyone else does. Richie decided to highlight the next generation of unsigned producers whose tracks he's been using in his DJ sets for years. For Richie these tracks were so special we wanted to make them available to our fans as part of a unique compilation 'Sounds From Can Elles'.

Deep House:

Soul Minority - Mozambique EP [Pack Up & Dance]

Motorcitysoul - Technique [Simple Records]

Trance:

Project FNP - Buzzed Up [Big Room Music (Fektive)]

Filo & Peri bring you a new project from themselves, giving us a totally new sound than you'd usually expect from them, think BIG, think Bigroom. This release has a stunning interpretation from John O'Callaghan under his J.O.C. guise. To complete this release Rick Snel adds a driving feel to the package. Can things really get any bigger & better ?!?