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Tic Tac Toe – Ephemerol

Here’s another one of those “how could I have gone 2 years without posting it” yet tracks. This one is by Simon Ratcliffe of Basement Jaxx, and is one of THE most essential hardcore whitelabels. The production is pretty low fi, but fits the track fine – a haunting piano loop, a multitude of break layers (probably too many – a regular amen, nwa-men, funky nassau and at least 2-3 more standard breaks I forget the names of and am too lazy to go hunting for now), a deep breakdown partway through which segues back into the tough-as-nails main part. This is simply a great hardcore track that doesn’t need razor sharp modern production to get its point across!

Since the track is pretty low fi, I tried re-eqing it a bit and running it through a bit of compression – feel free to let me know if this sounds too squashed and I’ll hold off doing it from future tracks. Also, despite the lowfi track sound, my copy of this is in suprisingly good shape – if anyone is aware of a bootleg pressing (which had the original logo) and of any ways to differentiate, please let me know in the comments, since I’d love to know if mine is original or not.


Tic Tac Toe – Ephemerol

9 Replies to “Tic Tac Toe – Ephemerol”

  1. Hey Pete

    Well, it’s nice to finally have a decent rip of this. I would’ve bought it years ago if I wasn’t skint, I’d buy it now if it wasn’t in the region of £50 a pop on Discogs!

    The beginning of this rip has some low freq rumbling and one large thump in the background of the tail end of the first bell sound, which does not repeat in the second bell sound. See if you can hear it on your vinyl. If it’s on the vinyl, it’s got to be a booty made by a person not being very still or quiet when ripping their vinyl and creating sounds which have been picked up by the turntable. Really listen hard to your vinyl copy too, and see if there is any extra surface noise that comes in when the bell sample starts. The rip sounds good though. Thanks a lot for this!

  2. thanks for the idea, the actual vinyl sounds a fair bit more tatty than this (lots of crackles) + that first bass hit is an artifact from the de-noiser plugin I ran on it. I wonder if crackley sound vs. really nice clean looking vinyl implies bootleg? Maybe I just need to try cleaning this copy well? It def has the tic tac toe stamp on it though that looks suprisingly not wown down (I’ve tried to keep this copy in great shape though, haven’t brought it out to any clubs to spin or anything).

  3. Thank you so much for this! Had this on an old Micky Finn tape, 14 overwrites deep… was looking for it but didn’t know the name. As if it’s Simon Ratcliffe?!
    Well thanks again, more like this please!

    Peace – Danny

  4. the rip seems fine to me – I tried my vinyl and it doesn’t seem that much better relatively speaking; i.e. on proper speakers vs computer speakers – long time since I played it too, so cheers for the reminder 🙂

  5. Well done for putting this up, what an amazing track, only just found out what it was last summer after 18 years loving it from Donovan Smith’s mix at Fantazia One Step Beyond – Managed to sniff out some really crusty recordings but this is amazing! 320kbps! I have literally dreamt of this!

  6. Cheers for this Pete.

    Really love this choon and it’s one of those rare ones that never pops up unless you’re minted, which is an absolute testament to tracks like this from back in the day (£50 a pop for a vinyl slab from an era and “genre” that was supposedly throw-away and would never stand the test of time, can’t say fairer than that ;)… )

  7. man thanks for this quality rip, it would be great if you could rip 456 too and possibly the remix

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