#cryptrik

Hey look - Cryptrik's back!! It wasn't all that long ago that they were featured on here with the delightfully danceable A Mambo Moment after all, but it's been a while since I've featured a rip that truly showcases the thing that really sets the guy apart. Indeed, it was mostly a topic brought up in his very first post on here, Halation Generation: moreso than just a fantastic ripper, Cryptrik also has plenty of experience as a DJ, and has leveraged that experience to great effect throughout their time on the channel. While most everyone else was doing melodyswaps and mashups in the channel's first Seasons, Cryptrik was out here feeding us with Feeder Castle 1 - a full-on techno rearrangement of an iconic, yet arguably restrained, Mario Kart theme.

I'm sure many of you can relate if you've grown up nostalgically attached to any Mario Kart (I've certainly not been shy of it in posts like Neon Wi-Fi and Initial Deluxe (I've Just Raced on this Course Before)) - the series' music just has a way of getting absolutely stuck in your ears. Yet a lot of the music from Super Circuit to me has long felt...unrealized - something about that game's particular instrumentation, held back by the restrictions of the GBA, made its tracks unable to flourish as much as their melodies suggest - thus, its Bowser Castle theme has been ingrained into my head from years of playing Mario Kart Wii, yet never been able to truly register as a great song. That was, of course, until I heard Feeder Castle 1 - leveraging a song that I'm convinced almost nobody in the target audience had properly heard of before in order to finally make this theme click into place.

It is of course a completely different vibe from the original GBA Bowser Castle theme, heavy techno likely wasn't what any of the original composers had in mind for giving Bowser Castle its finalized sound. Yet the different sections of Feeder, a techno song made through the combined efforts of Technikore, JTS, Al Storm and Weaver, lend themselves amazingly to the track - because where they differ in instrumentation, they make up for in having a pretty similar tone in sound. Bowser's Castle is meant to sound heavy and imposing to reflect the character itself, and though conveyed in an unorthodox way, that is ABSOLUTELY what Feeder Castle 1 manages to do, althewhile making the track's earworm melody sing all the louder through the bolder instrumentation.

The rip feels like the kind of thing that ONLY Cryptrik could make, leveraging a song that's seemingly on the more obscure end in the scene he's most familiar in the music world to use for such a specific purpose as an old GBA Mario Kart track. The passion behind the rip feels similar to You Give Me Color Power in that sense - yet the degree to which Feeder is modified to borderline just feel like an original rearrangement of the source track, PARTICULARLY in the opening few seconds, gives the rip such a specific character unique to Cryptrik.

God, man - I ALWAYS forget just how good Cryptrik is at ripping until I hear another one of his works. I've covered it from time to time on here already, primarily their great big mashup-medleys, Battle Emergency and Follow μ’s / Halation Generation - it came as no surprise at all to learn that the guy has experience in DJing. Yet in rediscovering Maroonbound recently, I was reminded of how vast Cryptrik's list of contributions really is, how many facets of it I'm still unfamiliar with. And now with A Mambo Moment, I'm starting to actually consider - is Cryptrik a Maroon 5head just like me??

Like, maybe Maroonbound should've made it obvious, but I'd partially just assumed it was made for Chaze the Chat moreso than due to Cryptrik himself actually being a Maroon 5 fan. And maybe that is the case, maybe this rip too isn't meant to be taken that seriously - but fuck man, Shiver? Of the songs on Songs About Jane, its hardly the most recognizable, it's not like Harder to Breathe 64 or Sunday Morning which used the album's big singles - Shiver is the kind of deep-cut that I myself had never even heard until listening to the whole album for myself. Mind, this isn't me complaining, Songs About Jane in its entirety is an all-time album for me for all of its tracks, and I adore Shiver as well: it blends an intimidating and almost threatening tone with a sense of funk only rivaled by fellow album deep-cut Tangled. Maybe it was that funkiness, and the inherent comedy in mashing up its imposing feel with a tune as fun-loving as Mambo No. 5, that led to A Mambo Moment being made - if such was the thought process, it was a stroke of genius.

And really, it is just that simple reason why this rip is featured here. Cryptrik found a really fun way to mash up two songs that feel as if on opposite ends of the vibe spectrum, elevating it beyond the standard mashup at several points throughout. Be it the rip's beginning including both Shiver's iconic guitar distortion and Mambo No. 5's verbal introduction, the slightly swing-ier rhythm that Shiver's vocals get to fit through the new percussion, the breaks in both songs' instrumentals at Mambo No. 5's designated pauses...it all works incredibly well!!

Over its life, there's been a lot of projects on SiIvaGunner where it's easy to tell they were driven by individual rippers' passions, moreso than satiating the hunger of a wider audience. There's of course Jass' excellent Genesis renditions of the soundtrack to Sonic CD, as shown in Collision Chaos Good Future JP [CD Beta Mix], there's ShonicTH's push for Kingdom Hearts content to be on the channel with rips like Trial of the Heart, and of course Chaze the Chat's legendary infatuation with pop music sensation Sean Kingston in Take You To The Desert - with no particularly strong feelings toward any other music artists of the 2000s. Yet of these projects listed, I don't think any of them felt quite as prominently featured on the channel as the three-part Paper Jams project.

Prominent channel member PinkieOats, of Live and Ooooooooooooooh, was once on an episode of the now-ended SiIvaGunner interview podcast series "The High Quality Podcast" (which, ftr was a huge inspiration for me to start this blog!). From just that one hour of time spent listening to PinkieOats alone, I could tell that the guy REALLY loved the first two Paper Mario games - hell, his profile picture since time immemorial has been of a pink Boo enemy rendered in the Paper Mario artstyle. Just a few months after said podcast episode, SiIvaGunner revealed "Paper Jams - and it thus came as no surprise to me to learn that it was a successor to a 2015 project by PinkieOats and Nape Mango, five whole years earlier. The goal of Paper Jams? To, across a collection of album, rip *every single track* from Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door.

The tracks wouldn't all be ripped by PinkieOats and Nape Mango this time, of course - they now had the entire SiIvaGunner team collaborating with them for this rather ambitious event, and the results of that collaboration are evident as clear as day with Cryptrik's Battle Emergency. I've covered Cryptrik's work in the past with rips like Maroonbound and Give Me the Fantasy, and it was actually my coverage on the latter rip that prompted today's requestee to suggest yet more of the guy's rips for the blog. But it really cannot be stressed enough just how effortlessly Cryptrik is consistently able to make his rips just sound flat-out FUN, in large thanks to his mastery of utilizing large amounts of pure *noise* in rips. It would not surprise me one bit if I learned he was an actual DJ, but his influences are immensely clear regardless - dude rocks, basically.

Battle Emergency straddles a fantastic line in my eyes between succumbing entirely to Cryptrik's noise-driven style and still maintaining the original charm of The Thousand-Year Door's music - a balance that I believe is important to have in mind whilst working for a tribute project like Paper Jams in particular. The whimsical, energetic vibe of the Battle Theme lying underneath it all doesn't get lost, but is coated in an absolute barrage of mostly funk-related songs - primarily led by FUNK EMERGENCY, but joined by parts from Walk the Dinosaur, Uptown Funk, and the ever-memorable melody of Black Betty (bam-ba-lam), really just letting Cryptrik go wild with his signature style.

I've talked before about the presence Maroon 5 have had on SiIvaGunner, all thanks to its creator Chaze the Chat's burning passion for the band and its history. Be it Chaze himself expressing it with rips like Moves Like K.K., or other rippers celebrating his passion along with him with rips like Siiva Lining and Catching Wild Animals, Trapping them with Strawberries. And for the celebration of his birthday in Season 2, we got some of the all-time best Maroon 5 rips - of which, Maroonbound remains my favorite. The sheer amount of effort Cryptrik has been putting into his rips from the get-go is practically unrivalled.

Maroonbound is such a distinctly Cryptrik-type of tribute to Maroon 5, a rip that feels as if it could only come from him. It uses the vocals of This Love as a base, but then goes through a good number of songs' instrumentation and melodies, primarily centered around Porter Robinson's very particular brand of electronic music. The resulting soundscape feels like it transcends just being a mashup - like Halation Generation, its more like a rip that explores a vast sea of different similar-sounding melodies to create a unified sound.

Cryptrik is a ripper I've wanted to talk about on the blog ever since it started, yet thus far I've only done so once on Halation Generation. They're amidst the pantheon of rippers who have stayed with the channel ever since its first season, and Cryptrik remains one of the most distinctive on the team in terms of their typical style. That style, as you may already be familiar with, is very DJ-esque - several rips they've made are pretty much entirely original arrangements with heavy rave/electronic/dance feel to it, and I'm dying to cover some more of those in particular.

Granted, Give Me the Fantasy is a bit more of a traditional rip than the other Cryptrik works I'm alluding to - its a mashup between Pitbull's Give Me Everything and Endless Fantasy by Anamanaguchi. It plays off of a big part of the appeal of both KFaD Tournaments, that rips no longer had an obligation to come from video games so long as they were tied to a tournament contestant. Rips have of course never *required* explicit ties to video games, but tournament entrants like Pitbull gave rippers a clear theme to center around that wasn't related to video games, to great success.