On Thursday, March 20, UR’s on-campus radio station, WRUR, announced that they would be giving UR freshman Otto Miyazo a radio show on “The Sting”, an online radio subsidiary of WRUR. This is latest step in a series of steps that WRUR has done in order to become more ‘indie’, at least in the face of rising criticism against mainstream and Top 40 radio. According to leaked documents acquired from the station, Miyazo’s show will be exclusively and excessively streaming from Bandcamp, a popular source of music distribution for unsigned artists.
Miyazo, a freshman, stands tall at 5’3’’, and his black, thick-rimmed glasses only accentuate his curves.
Miyazo describes himself as “indie with an edge”. He does not deny reading Pitchfork, a popular (mostly) indie music blog, but not for the experience. “It’s become my life,” he admits. Miyazo describes a lifestyle where he goes to bed at 1:05 every night. He waits until 1:01 for Pitchfork reviews to go online, and spends just four minutes perusing the articles for buzzwords like “edgy”, “post-consumer”, and “relevant”. Then, he falls asleep, attempting to enter a state of emotional and physical purity.
On the off chance that Miyazo desires to play “obscure shit”, he has an SA-allocated budget for “cassettes, vinyl, and other forms of ‘experimental media’”. SA, which has among its loyal supporters various members of the indie establishment (some of whom have Bandcamps themselves), is likely to increase his budget to include “sound art” and “anti-music”.
Miyazo does not shy away from criticism. “Dude. My last.fm page has the most obscure music on the planet: Japanese proto-punk, North Korean folk, Chilean reggae. #2Indie5You,” he tweeted.
Only two people retweeted him.
They were both South African post-consumer troubadours who were self-described (at least in their About sections) “nihilists.”.
According to an anonymous source, Miyazo is a member of the Sweater Collective, an underound collective mostly made up of members of the Sigma Phi Epsilon fraternity. They reportedly talk about “all things tweed and suede.” Representatives of Sigma Phi Epsilon had no comment.
In a long series of tweets Monday night, Miyazo tried to justify himself in the face of the “mainstream machine.”
“What if we’re all just one big animal collective,” he asked. “Would that make me a panda bear?”
Schaffer is a member of the class of 2016.
