REVIEW: Dagmar Zuniga’s Dreamlike Debut ‘in filth your mystery is kingdom / far smile peasant in yellow music’
WRITTEN BY AMANDA COLLINS
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Dagmar Zuniga’s debut solo album in filth your mystery is kingdom / far smile peasant in yellow music, released April 10 via London-based label AD 93, unfolds nonlinearly, falling within the experimental folk genre. The album asks the listener to become quiet and still, allowing Zuniga’s whispers to guide them. Creating a lasting impression, the album exists less as a narrative but closer to an emotionally textured memory, something Zuniga achieves beautifully.
Shaped over five years, the album is filled with a sense of patience that never feels forced. Using the organ, bells, and guitar, Zuniga creates a sound that is both ghostly and comforting at once. The melodies often feel blurred at the edges, as if the album is a memory itself.
The production of in filth your mystery is kingdom / far smile peasant in yellow music is inseparable from the use of the Tascam 424, a 4-track analog cassette recorder and mixer from the 90s. The use of the recorder is central to the atmosphere, giving each of the album’s 14 tracks a worn-in texture, where the notes seem to have candlelight surrounding them, intimate as they are. Used by the likes of Elliott Smith on his debut album Roman Candle, the use of a recorder similarly gives Zuniga’s debut album a singularly raw, weathered, myth-like feel.
Zuniga’s vocals drift through the album in whispers, her lyrics never needing to fully explain themselves but instead alluding to themes of solitude and nostalgia. On “A Car With No Lights On”, Zuniga’s haunting sense of solitude is clear, opening with the lyrics “There really is no one / You can be certain of / There’s a devil that you notice / What’s the devil know you from?”. These striking lyrics contrast with those of “Why I Remember (Each Day of Summer)”, with lines like “White / Ripe / Strawberry bruise / Beats / In the heart too”, where lyrics seem to be intentionally fragmented, understood like a puzzle yet to be pieced together completely. Universal memory is found in these fragments, where listeners can place themselves in the spaces she leaves open for interpretation. This choice pushes the listener into the further corners of their own psyche, allowing them to dig up their own meanings.
Stylistically intangible, yet still lingering and settling into the bones like ancient memory, the album is an immersive journey. The listener becomes both observer and participant in its world, which is emotionally full yet held at a distance.
Dagmar Zuniga acts as a guide through waves of unsettling feeling, casting the listener into a time-capsule of their own past. in filth your mystery is kingdom / far smile peasant in yellow music does not ask for a resolution to solitude or deep longing for a time far gone, but instead creates space to sit within these feelings.
This debut album marks the beginning of an artistic path for Dagmar Zuniga that feels deeply promising and distinctly her own.