[Slow to Speak]

All the hippest wax this year has reached techno heads with as little adornment and explanation as feasibly possible. “At The End of the World,” a single-sided oddity from Brooklyn’s Slow To Speak label and unknown producer Dan Quin, offers white label followers something unexpected: a wealth of information. Tucked neatly into the paper sleeve behind the hand-stamped vinyl, a note entitled “Dan Quin Background Analysis” on Old Antarctic Explorers Association letterhead details the spiritual and scientific journey of the producer in question. It could all be a gas, but here goes: while covering the Antarctic seal-mating beat for “a prominent U.S. nature magazine,” this “anti-social Steve Irwin” abandoned human society to become one with his desolate surroundings and ultimately find “his igloo of inspiration.”

Whatever you make of this yarn replete with dubious tales of whale-riding championships and campaigns for Antarctic “national liberation,” you’d be hard-pressed to deny the charms of the track it so grandly introduces. A super-tough New York underground house jam with a heart of gold, “At The End of the World” brings just enough strange tweaks to distinguish itself from its small-press brethren. A old school arrangement of barely quantized drum machines and loping bass doesn’t place the track too far south of Levon Vincent, but brash, avalanche-like builds that find the bass getting squelchier and the hi-hats splashing around make this slab a veritable Yeti in your record bag. The real gems of the arrangement, though, are Quin’s “seal cry” field recordings stitched through these builds. The sheets of laser smothering so much raw techno these days have nothing on these electric and otherworldly sounds, recalling more the eerie splendor of the Aurora Borealis than a superclub’s lighting rig. There’s certainly some disconnect between the massiveness of Quin’s groove and the “silence” the insert claims was his biggest inspiration, but I’m willing to take this slab on its own big-room merits. The coldest part of the world may have just turned up the heat.