Dagmar Zuniga

In an era of cheap and relatively pristine recording technology, people rarely make records like Dagmar Zuniga these days. Though young enough to be surprised when she learned the Chicks were boycotted after criticizing George W. Bush, she records everything on a gifted Tascam 424, the decades-old four-track whose predecessors were key to indie rock’s lo-fi fringe. But Zuniga’s music goes well beyond the tape hiss and aleatoric pops of those songwriters, using the tape recorder like an ensemble of instruments, burying or buoying the lilting melodies and hymn-like lines she sings in a soft and breathy alto. It’s like leaning close to an image until the focus makes everything fuzzy, the shapes warping into new ones. Growing up as a Nicaraguan-American kid in a loud house in Miami, she would load worn old cassettes into her tape deck and listen for the hiss. “I was hearing the sound of the tape itself,” she once said. “It all made me aware of liminal sound.”

In early January 2025, Zuniga quietly released in filth your mystery is kingdom / far smile peasant in yellow music, a 14-song set recorded and stitched together over a five-year period that included stints on a Norwegian sheep farm and in Georgia. Its songs were inviting and inscrutable, demanding closer attention but not giving much away through it, either. She opened with “Even God Gets Stuck in Devotion,” like an acoustic lullaby, before twisting the same song into a piano maze three tracks later. “Rose of Mysterious Union” is all backmasked vocal mystery, “Garden” a tender tune so gently blown-out it seems to arrive via a faraway radio station. These songs eventually caught the ear of Phil Elverum, who asked Zuniga to open for Mount Eerie, and AD93, who reissued them in 2026. Onstage without the Tascam, Zuniga has found new ways to retreat into the songs without the static, a trick that pulls you in closer than before.