Review: Dagmar Zuniga • In Filth Your Mystery is Kingdom/Far Smile Peasant in Yellow Music
In Filth Your Mystery is Kingdom/Far Smile Peasant in Yellow Music — songs that return twice, never identical: the same melody, two lives, two states of the same thought.
Dagmar Zuniga records songs onto a tape that gives them back altered, ghosts of themselves. Lo-fi folk and hauntology where the voice, reversed and oxidised, becomes the cast of a voice — the dead returning to sing.
There's a moment, inside this record, when a voice is sent backwards — and stops being a voice to become the cast of a voice, the negative of something once spoken that now returns stripped of meaning, keeping only its grain. That's where In Filth Your Mystery Is Kingdom tells you what it is: not a record of songs, but a record of songs passed through a membrane that hands them back altered, as though they'd been cut, buried, and exhumed by someone else. Dagmar Zuniga recorded them on a four-track Tascam, and the tape isn't the medium: it's the living thing that eats the sound and gives it back changed.
"Even God Gets Stuck in Devotion" opens like something out of a manual of the darkest English folk — an acoustic guitar delicately picked, slow, advancing like someone walking through a wood they know by heart. Then the record makes it again, later, condensed to less than half: a dramatic piano and a voice that echoes through recesses and hidden folds, where something nests far from the light. The same song twice, never the same — and in the gap between the two versions the whole record is already there: the idea that a thing returns changed, that the return is always a deviation.
"Plenty for All the Masses" sounds like a piece out of the French chanson tradition, a solitary chansonnier whose acoustic guitar pushes past the fader and breaks into distortion, as if the feeling exceeded the medium and tore it; its twin, "Plenty (For All of Life's Messes)", is gentler in its chords and its voice, the same bridge seen at another hour. "Garden", with Hayes Hoey, and other moments of the record start from simple arpeggios on which slowcore has built a scene, and between magnetic tape and background noise, with Zuniga's voice holding the thread, the result is pure hauntological folk — nothing like it has been heard in a long while.
And it's here that the record looks across the Channel without knowing it. There's a moment when Zuniga seems to imitate Ghost Box — the English label that made a language out of recovering a pedagogical, unsettling past — but translated into human, instrumental terms, stripped of the public-information-film electronics. The move is the same: Belbury Poly took the voice of a folk singer cut onto a cylinder in 1908 and, altering its speed and pitch, made a dead man sing a new song. Zuniga does the same with herself — she records herself, reverses herself, makes herself the ghost of her own singing. "Her Master's Voice", under that Victorian-phantom of a title, recalls Beach House — only here Beach House have been put through Zuniga's tape, the smoothness of that dream pop now cracked, oxidised.
"LN60: Jupiter Opposite Jupiter" is where the record pushes furthest: organs out of tune, flanger, synths that won't stay in scale and mimic a freak stage. Expansive in the head, a journey — and then comes the thing that was missing, the voice mixed in reverse, and it turns mad in the good way.
The songs feel like interrupted sketches, takes caught half-finished, Zuniga's voice always on the verge of dissolving into the magnetic rust around it. And perhaps the loveliest title on the record, "Memory Always Sees the Loved One Smaller", names its method too: memory shrinks the one you love, sets them further off, makes them a ghost. The tape does the same. To replay is to misremember, and to misremember — here — is the only form of faithfulness.
Artist: Dagmar Zuniga
Album: In Filth Your Mystery is Kingdom/Far Smile Peasant in Yellow Music 2026 (AD93)
Duration: 29'
Genre: ghost folk, lo-fi folk, ambient folk, singer-songwriter
Tracklist: Even God Gets Stuck in Devotion (feat. Austyn Wohlers), Plenty for All the Masses, Plenty (For All of Life's Messes), Even God Gets Stuck in Devotion (feat. Zach Phillips), Garden (with Hayes Hoey), Photography the Hard Way (feat. Hayes Hoey), Why I Remember (Each Day of Summer), LN60: Jupiter Opposite Jupiter, Rose of Mysterious Union, A Car With No Lights On, Her Master's Voice, Memory Always Sees the Loved One Smaller, In Filth Your Mystery Is Kingdom, To Live Happily
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