Season 4 Episode 2
Featured on: Halation Celebration ~ 10th Anniversary Tribute to Snow halation
Ripped by Joshua Taipale, Nolithium ft. Charles Ritz
December 2020. Near the end of Season 4 Episode 2, closing out SiIvaGunner's fifth year straight of running, a new project is suddenly unveiled to us as part of the SiIvaGunner All-Star Winter Festival. To commemorate the tenth anniversary of Love Live's Snow Halation, a song closely tied to the channel's history, the SiIvaGunner team unveiled "Halation Celebration" - a full-on arrangement album featuring two dozen contributions both from within the team and from external submissions. You can sort of trace a journey here, from the original King for a Day Tournament, to the King for Another Day Tournament, to Halation Celebration, and to Season 5 and beyond - the journey that would eventually form "SiIvaGunner Fusion Records", the branding used to denote these sorts of full-scale arrangement projects in the future.
I've talked about a few of these in the past - hell, the blog's first-ever post was on Running Through Cookie Country from SGFR's "Super Star Symphony" project, and later on I'd cover *** EVERYTHING IS FINE *** from the first SGFR release of Season 7 - "Shovelware from Beyond the Deep!". Yet for as great as all these projects are, it all truly began with a Christmas celebration - it all began with Snow Halation, and for my money snow halation but it shreds was one of the utmost best parts of that celebration.
And that's not to disparage or dismiss any of the other contributions - like every SGFR release, Halation Celebration is filled with tons of different interpretations, different styles and creators all outputting at an utmost high level of quality, to where it almost does feel a little bad to pick just one favorite. Yet I am at the end of the day merely a Sonic fan, a total sucker for punk-rock and wailing electric guitars - and snow halation but it shreds is quite literally exactly what it promises on the tin. And its a fantastic performance - though I adored hearing the arrangements from SiIva's mainstay rippers, its just as fascinating to hear contributions from people like Joshua Taipale and Nolithium, who contribute despite otherwise not being associated with the channel! And the two are EXCELLENT musicians in their own right - something that I only discovered through this arrangement.
Holiday cheer can be a lot of things, and there's going to be a variety of different rips featured on the blog during the month to truly encompass that (and some more silly stuff too, don't worry!). Yet its in large part about appreciation and celebration, of shared and spread love and joy. And that feeling transcends any sort of conventions of music genres - that joy can be felt, even through the shredding riffs of snow halation but it shreds. Every part of Halation Celebration is an absolute gift, and I'm eternally going to be grateful for it playing part in kickstarting SGFR, and introducing me to so many talented musicians both inside the team and out.
This is so beautiful!!!! The cutie Emi Jones is a awesome singer >w<. BTW, this song was performed by Juni’chi Kanemaru (Japanese Sonic Voice actor) Please give her love <3
Season 2
Featured on: Rips of Christmas Past
Also on: SiIvaGunner: Starter Kit & Essentials
Ripped by MtH, dante, turdl3, Charles Ritz, TylerNJazz, toonlink, trivial171, wolfman1405, Chaze the Chat, Princess Sylvysprit, beat_shobon, Can of Nothing
December!! Christmas times!! The holidays!! Wahoo!!
There's of course always a lot of excitement in the air during December, even if its...largely manufactured by big companies. Yet ever since 2016, I've had far more of a personal attachment to the month - the end of SiIvaGunner Season 1, and the beginning of Season 2, was some of the most engrossed I've ever been engrossed with a piece of media - and it was all punctuated with the Patched Plains Fusion Collab.
It may be hard to truly convey to newer SiIva viewers just how suspenseful and strange the month of October was during 2016. For all intents and purposes, the channel appeared to have truly ENDED with Epic Flintstones, and everything that led up to its release just further cemented that. We'd gotten behind-the-scenes reveals of unresolved content, some of the channel's biggest projects and collaborations up to that point, a huge amount of new albums within such a short amount of time...there was very little to suggest that SiIva wouldn't actually be ending. Yet viewers paying attention would be able to connect the dots, these small little hints dropped during the finale, all connected to "Wood Man" - and mind you, this was before he was even established as a character on the channel!
Just a few days after the official ending, as SiIva had gone to sleep and the channel had been avoiding uploads for so long - uploads suddenly returned, as this "Wood Man" character became the new host at the start of November. This wasn't the first time a story event had been happening on SiIva, yet it was one that left us as viewers confused and in the dark of what was truly happening, due to the lack of a proper narrator. After just two weeks and an album release, halfway through the month, uploads suddenly ceased and the channel went dark. So...was the channel actually dead? Was this just a little bonus Halloween thing, to let the team play around with Wood Man as a character in an epilogue to the actual channel?
Turns out, it was all build-up to December - to the Christmas Comeback Crisis. The channel ending, the virus in his computer, the Voice Inside Your Head, Wood Man - it was all revealed to be part of this all new ongoing storyline, presented to us in full-on episodes during the month of December. Like a light switch turned on, the confusion and uncertainty of November turned into full-on celebration of SiIva's seemingly-now-confirmed return to regular uploading. This was the start of Season 2 - and it was, in my eyes, an absolutely perfect premiere.
I really want to go more in-depth on this someday, but I'll circle back to Patched Plains Fusion Collab to round the story out - because really, it was this rip that really cemented Season 2 as having officially begun, halfway through December 2016. It had been a month since Wood Man's sudden leave from the channel, and out of nowhere we're given an animated prologue to this all-new Christmas-themed storyline, directly based on Kirby: Planet Robobot from earlier that year. And after that sudden gut punch, we're treated to an absolute feast for the ears - a red-carpet introduction to the sort of quality we were about to experience. Kirby: Planet Robobot already had a heavy presence on SiIva due to The Reboot, and so starting this big new story event off with another rip from that same game felt like a sort of reassurance - this wasn't a bit, or a side story, or anything of the sort, but the full next step of the SiIvaGunner channel.
As a rip, it's frankly excellent - it has all the quality of the average Fusion Collab on the channel condensed down to just two minutes, covering everything from different genres of music, different games, different time signatures, and everything inbetween - a remix collaboration in the purest sense of the word, and an absolute treat to listen to. A big benefit to fusion collabs of this nature is that you're able to very clearly identify who is responsible for what parts of the rip - Princess Sylvyspirit's involvement is immediately noticeable as soon as the Touhou segment begins, Chaze's affection for MOTHER 3 is expressed through his part in the collaboration, and so on!
Despite the song only having a brief segment on Christmas near the beginning, the spirit is absolutely there throughout all of Patched Plains Fusion Collab - its a celebration of what was to come, a joyous theme that let all of its collaborators truly show their stuff at the start of this new age for the channel. And its a rip that I often come back to just for that sheer nostalgia alone.
OCR04678:
The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time: Cucco Feathers - Lucas Guimaraes, Charles Ritz
[Kakariko Village]
from OverClocked ReMix; track originally from the album Through the Sacred Realm: Ocarina of Time 25th Anniversary Album by GameGrooves Charity. more by Lucas Guimaraes and Charles Ritz linked below
song credits:
Lucas Guimaraes: Arranger, Producer, Drum Programming, Mixer
Charles Ritz: Producer, Arranger, Piano, Bass, Vocals
