i feel like i need to explain the existence of this playlist, if not for anyone else then for myself. i know, i'm ruining the "self-explanatory" joke in the description that hinges on the assumption that no one outside of osu circles would know who "ristel" is & no one inside osu circles would know what qualifies as a "selection".
simply put, it's my collection of every song & album that maliszewski has referenced on social media in some way, shape, or form. whether it's profile pictures, profile banners, usernames, or quoted song lyrics: if it's on spotify, it's in the playlist.
and... idk, it feels like a weird thing to keep track of, right? it's one thing to track every song a streamer has played because that's evidently part of their music taste, but i'm tracking music that's implied to be part of maliszewski's music taste.
i can make an educated guess that maliszewski probably listens to ethel cain based on how his youtube channel's name is the title of one of her songs (albeit stylized in lowercase & no spacing), his osu profile used to quote another song of hers (i'd link it but wayback machine appears to be dying rn), and how he had a list of shoegaze & trance artist recommendations (that's since been deleted) and ethel cain was one of them... but at the same time i can't confirm that he'd listen to those specific songs.
you see where i'm going with this, right? it's bordering on conspiratorial thinking & seeing patterns where there are none. just because he changed his profile banner to emperor's in the nightside eclipse at some point & wore merch of said band to coe doesn't mean he likes the album, right? am i overthinking all this? am i going insane?
on one hand, it's a weird thing to keep track of, but on the other hand it's a really convenient way for me to dip my toes into music genres well outside my comfort zone. and hey, it's not like this is the first time i've tried something out solely because of my favorite player. i keep trying to convince myself that this is different and wrong somehow but it really isn't. i need to stop doing this