#sgfr

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.