Now that every hostelry and meeting house has a resident DJ and a range of spin-off accoutrements, I find it very difficult to keep my attention focused on what I truly desire: namely, a well sequenced, non-monging set of diverse tunes that don't remind me that I look like a moron when I dance.

I recently took a trip around the bed and breakfast inns of Maine, and I was accosted at each of them by pushy salespersons' hell-driven intent on my not only enjoying my breakfast meal of crab quiche with an asparagus and egg-drop coulee, but also my purchasing the first three volumes of their eldest son's mix CD collection. And how gamely I tried to resist! It was only at the Ogunquit Stately Manor Pile when I was threatened with purchasing either a teddy made of torn mink fur stoles, or the gangly young master's hard house and jam band comp, that I gave in. Teddy is, to this day, very cute.

So you'll appreciate my slight trepidation when I started to listen to Dub Plates from the Lamp, a compilation of demos that Pork, Fila Brazilia's former label, have premiered at their local pub and seen fit to release. But I shouldn't have felt queasy. Perhaps I was still feeling the effects of too much exposure to the piratical tactics of Pine State retailers.

Doubtless, myriad bedroom tossers throw off a Funky Drummer loop/funky Rhodes melange and expect Pork to swoon and inundate those responsible with Kate Hudson-ish cuties. As Dub Plates from the Lamp testifies, those wishing such successes aren't restricted by the gray-sky-scum of Pork's hometown, Hull. No, they come from the Czech Republic, Norway, and even Croydon (probably). And they all deserve a huge, transcontinental "yay!"

Thomas Kennedy begins the set with a stark, minimal, and beguiling shuffle called "Women and Money." The track seems to detail a young man's drifting ambivalence to two very important parts of Creation. Kennedy returns later in the proceedings with "Belize," which would smoothly snuggle up to the Flying Fish's "The Bloc," the stunning opener to LTJ Bukem's Earth Four compilation.

After the repetitive b-boy-meets-Ibiza beach-bum "Sound of the Camel" by Free Drinks, Unforscene's "Sunbear and the Orange Light" takes us on a giddy strings-and-Rhodes trip from chill-out to get-down. This outfit's second cut, "Z," returns us back to ganga-fried, crashpad solitudes. And the nu-jazz massive will revel in the swinging joys of Xploding Plastic's "Let's Pretend Desperate."

Jeremy Beecher's "Passtime" collides a Shostakovich string quartet with tablas and the energy of a Steve McQueen soundtrack. The track darts from extreme to extreme, never failing to nestle up to our quenched sympathies. It would be a perfect conclusion to this compilation, had the Pork folks not discovered Banabila and flourished this remarkable disc with "Mono/Metro," a holler-sampling-and-contorting fragment of genius that Moby would stomp Fairfield County, Connecticut into the subsoil for.

Given that the Lamp of the title resembles a working men's club more accustomed to throwing grab-a-granny nights, it's all the more outstanding that nights out at the Lamp can attract such luminescent talent. I walk away, with boundless hope in my heart that the Belgrade, Maine Elks Lodge will release the definitive illbient comp.

-Paul Cooper