#tripleq

High Quality Never Dies.

The end of Season 3 was quite a tumultuous time for SiIva. Being a music channel on YouTube, the SiIvaGunner channel always teeters over the gaping maw of copyright strikes from music production companies, made worse by YouTube's lack of protection from these false strikes. All of SiIvaGunner's content obviously falls under the umbrella of fair use by the nature of the channel: its core goal and aim is to REMIX music, not reupload it. Yet, in December 2018, eight videos were targeted by Sony Music Entertainment of Japan, which eventually spiralled into the channel's deletion at the beginning of 2019. Five years and one day ago, on January 9th, SiIvaGunner celebrated its third anniversary - with its main channel dead in the water due to YouTube's incompetency.

It's a damn shame that shit like this can happen to just about any aspiring creator on YouTube, and the team was immensely fortunate to have an audience large enough to catch YouTube's attention this time. By February of that same year, the channel was back, Season 3 was over, and Season 4 Episode 1 was officially online. And those copystruck rips were not going to be forgotten.

Kill & Learn (Recut Ver.) is not the same rip as the one that was initially part of that eight-video striking spree from 2018. Yet its an absolutely terrific remastering effort, uploaded during the long-awaited STUDIO TRIGGER event later in the Season. Much like the Planet Wisp Mashup Medley, its a direct tribute to the legendary ripper Triple-Q and one of his many in-jokes, of drawing comparison between the stories of Sonic Adventure 2 and STUDIO TRIGGER's Kill La Kill. Kill & Learn (Recut Ver.) is technically the third spin on this idea, with Triple-Q's own mashup Kill la Kill OST: Final Boss Theme first, followed by the original Kill & Learn (Uncut Ver.), and finally with Kill & Learn (Recut Ver.). All three follow the same premise, mashing up Kill La Kill's second OP Ambiguous with the main theme of Sonic Adventure 2, Live & Learn, yet all feel very different from one another. Live & Learn (Recut Ver.) is, to me, the ultimate endpoint of this concept, and the best of the three - it screams hype from every point of the song, with Live & Learn's vocals fitting the instrumental of Ambiguous like a glove - it's a mashup that felt destined to happen, and is here executed with five years worth of refining.

(heads-up: there's no YouTube embed on this one because the rip has been blocked due to copyright. RIP to the comments too)

(heads-up 2: the Bandcamp is still down, and the rip is too large to embed. A Google Drive embed is what you get instead.)

Ah, Triple-Q...perhaps the ripper whose name was MOST well known in the early days of SiIva. Its hard to say exactly what is is about Q that constantly draws so attention to him. Be it his Twitter antics, over a decade's worth of experience doing audio shitposting, a very strong and consistent brand of humor and content, or some combination of all of the above - Triple-Q's influence on SiIvaGunner during Season 1 was unmistakably his. He's pretty much THE reason Snow Halation got an immovable slot in the channel's lineup of jokes, and had tons of influence all around in those early years.

As I've covered before on File Select Fusion Collab, the Season 1 finale was originally meant to be THE ending of the channel, which meant that a lot of rips made during it had a very...bittersweet tone to them. Some, like the aforementioned Fusion Collab, gave heartfelt thanks to the channel's fans for being part of it, wheras some like Everyday Goodbyes (SiIvaGunner Band Cover) were more personal passion projects from the team. During this entire event, Planet Wisp Mashup Medley stood out as particularly interesting - a massive 21 minute jamboree of mashups, all connected through the various theme songs of Planet Wisp from Sonic Colors. And according to Triple-Q, Planet Wisp is a song so personal to him, he considers it his own leitmotif. This was no coincidence.

Essentially, Planet Wisp Mashup Medley takes Triple-Q's entire history of Planet Wisp mashups and remixes from 2012 to 2016, and melds and mixes them together to form one giant, sudden loveletter to one of SiIva's most important contributors. To those out of the loop with Triple-Q, this was a rip already worth celebrating over its length and consistent variety in sound. To those IN the loop, this was something else entirely, and as the years went on has become sort of a parting gift to the guy. Q doesn't really contribute to SiIva anymore and left the team right at the end of the first Season, yet the mark he left on the channel has been immense.