The debut album by Nicaraguan-American artist Dagmar Zuniga, released quite discreetly in January 2025 on YouTube and Bandcamp, quickly earns a modest online following, racking up hundreds of thousands of views. This little jewel, once confined to a handful of lucky algorithmics or niche forums, is granted a revival on the British label AD 93.
Dagmar Zuniga crafted her first record, In Filth Your Mystery Is Kingdom / Far Smile Peasant In Yellow Music, across New York, Norway, and the Georgian city of Athens, over a span of five years. In January 2025, the musician released the album for the first time on YouTube and Bandcamp, through an obscure Texas label, People’s Coalition of Tandy.
“It feels like an album meant to be lost. Voices of devout angels turned into ghosts, yearning to recover something. Their home was a false paradise, a promise abandoned. Behind their hymns and prayers, only their tousled and shattered whispers remain. The regret.”, commented a year ago by a certain @DrewPDrawerz on the very first YouTube upload of In Filth, dated January 8, 2025. @Arcanalotus22 even goes so far as to thank “the gods of the algorithm. It’s incredible!” before adding “I find it hard to believe that this music is recent.”
The story of In Filth is that of an album that became a cult favorite within a small community of fans who spread the word, before this nearly lost treasure landed in the ears of Nic Tasker, head of the excellent record label AD 93, who decides to sign Dagmar Zuniga and give In Filth a second life. In the meantime, Zuniga is noticed by the post-folk unit Mount Eerie, with whom she goes on tour in 2025. The musician also hosts a monthly show on the web radio NTS, “World of Pain w/ Dagmar Zuniga”.
Sonic Lace
There is something physical in Zuniga’s music, a sound crafted with a delicacy akin to the touch of lace. Here, thread and needle are replaced by magnetic-tape recording, a central element for the artist who says, “If something doesn’t materialize, then it doesn’t exist.” Using her trusty Tascam 4‑track, the Brooklyn-based artist records otherworldly melodies, elevated by the breath and compression inherent to magnetic tape.
In the first half of the album, opening with the deeply devotional Even God Gets Stuck In Devotion, the artist plays with variations on the same motifs. In Filth gradually pivots toward the experimental, with the backwards tape on Rose of Mysterious Union, the pitch-shifted voices of Her Master’s Voice, a recording of the ocean (or is it the tape’s breath?) that blankets Memory Always Sees The Loved One Smaller, and the tentative noise-drone instrumental explorations of To Live Happily. The eponymous track blends an organ of haunting beauty with the rhythm of a clock, evoking a countdown… Dagmar Zuniga crafts her music around themes of loneliness and suffering, giving birth to a strange work that opens to the world in the most subtle way. With In Filth, Zuniga positions herself as the most intriguing artisan of the magnetic-tape era.
Dagmar Zuniga, In Filth Your Mystery Is Kingdom / Far Smile Peasant In Yellow Music (AD 93) available for streaming. Physical release on April 10. More information and preorders here.
