Todays rip: 17/11/2023
Beyond the Floating Isles
Season 4 Episode 2 Featured on: Summer-Colored Smiles ~ The SiIvaSummer All-Star Festival Collection
Ripped by redoxwarfare
Due to the absolute volume of rips per each album, a lot of my time listening to SiIvaGunner is done so rather passively. I'll chuckle with a joke I recognize, add tracks to "Banger" and "Vibes" playlists if I'm enjoying them, and continue with my day. Its only when I decide to just listen to those playlists in particular that my brain starts getting into gear again. Like...what *is* Beyond the Floating Isles even from? I knew it was an absolute vibe of a rip, yet knew nothing else about it. That was when my journey started - and my sudden, adoring infatuation with the band "Crying".
I only just recently turned 22 years old, and for a long part of that life, I didn't really...listen to music. I enjoyed looking up my favorite video game music, and Minecraft music videos were of course part of the collective childhood of my generation...yet the act of just listening to music for music's sake, the appeal of the creative medium, was somehow lost on me. There's likely something deep-rooted in my neurodivergent mind that explains this, but SiIvaGunner has as a result been a way for me to find bands and albums that I truly connect with - through the shared passion of video game music, I've been able to grow that emotional attachment to bands that I otherwise wholly felt like I lacked. The most prominent example of that is of course Maroon 5 thanks to channel creator Chaze the Chat's enduring passion for the band in the channel's first four Seasons: I've discussed in posts like Moves Like K.K. just how much that passion reflected back onto me, and its far from the only band I've gone through this with. It may sound silly to say, but these video game mashups and arrangements and meme edits have genuinely helped me grow attached to vocals and melodies and themes from the wider music industry that I never would've otherwise.
Which brings us to my most recent experience with this - Beyond the Floating Isles, and Patriot by Crying. After making more of an initiative for myself to listen to more non-VGM this year, and after having this rip sit in my playlists for years on end, I decided it was finally time to do my due digging. What I found was a band I'd never heard of before, with only one true album release, and a lack of any real activity over the last six years. Beyond the Fleeting Gales sits at just shy of 150 thousand views on YouTube - less than SEVERAL of the rips I've covered here on this blog, yet is one of my new all-time favorite albums yet released. Patriot may be the song covered in today's rip and the one I'm the most emotionally attached to, but the album in its entirety exudes a similar vibe that I'm absolutely enamored with - a vibe that redoxwarfare did an incredible job distilling into a rip. Float Islands was an excellent choice for a song to use for such an atmospheric, uplifting song as Patriot - the two themes have little in common in terms of joke-material, but its clear to me that Beyond the Floating Isles was not made with comedy as its main intent.
I have no connection to redoxwarfare - never spoken, not sure of which rips they've made prior, and no true image of their interests and goals as a ripper. Yet Beyond the Floating Isles speaks with so much intent and love - love for a band that feels destined to be forgotten, yet is adored by the few in the masses who have found them. And I extend my deepest, sincerest gratitude toward redoxwarfare for succesfully introducing me to Crying - even if its three years after the fact, I now finally see the Fleeting Gales, and beyond.
(no but seriously go listen to Crying i will break traditional post formatting just to give you easy access to it theyre SO GOOD)
