Rising: Dagmar Zuniga captures life in quiet fragments

Sounds like: Whispered melodies and hazy tape reels
Soundtrack for: Watching sheep grazing on a hill 
File next to: Grouper, Cindy Lee
Our favourite song: Photography the Hard Way 
Where to find her: @dagmarzuni

A compulsive recorder of everyday life, the artist weaves field recordings and whispered melodies into an intimate, transportive debut.

In 2022, Dagmar Zuniga packed up her life in New York, sold her belongings and moved to rural Norway. Armed with a few essential items of clothing and the Tascam tape recorder she’s had since her mid-teens, the producer and singer arrived on a farm and spent the next eight months shepherding, gardening and cooking for a family in exchange for room and board. Keeping her hands busy, it was during this quiet time under wide Norwegian skies that the seeds of her tape-worn debut album in filth your mystery is kingdom / far smile peasant in yellow music were planted.

“There were 12 of us living there and hundreds of sheep – I could spend hours just gazing out of my window, watching them like TV,” Zuniga says. “I found it really inspiring because, while doing menial labour, a song would develop in my head. The ambience of the environment would impact me.”

Following further travels through Greece and Georgia before returning to New York – where she is now, speaking over video call from her basement studio – Zuniga began compiling the field recordings and melodic ideas that make up her beguiling 2025 debut. From the finger-picked guitar and flute balladry of Even God Gets Stuck in Devotion to the charmingly clunky drum-machine layering of Photography the Hard Way, the ethereal choral harmonies of Why I Remember (Each Day of Summer) and the plaintive keyboard melodies of To Live Happily, the 14 brief tracks of Zuniga’s 29-minute record are tied together by the impressionistic haze of her tape-recording process.

“I’m a compulsive recorder; I have a dictaphone and several small cassette recorders I take everywhere with me,” Zuniga says in the whisper-soft voice that populates her album. “I love to have a physical archive of my life – all these different kinds of moments make their way into my music.”

Growing up in Miami with her brother and Nicaraguan mother, Zuniga recalls Mexican singer Juan Gabriel’s lovelorn lament Amor Eterno playing in her earliest memories. “My mother would play that song every morning and it would get me out of bed,” she smiles. “I quickly became obsessed with music, and by eight years old I was fronting my own band with a few other girls and writing all the music for it.”

While her social life was punctuated by her nascent music-making, at home things were more chaotic. “I lived in a really loud household, and I loved sometimes to just sit with my headphones on and listen to the hiss of a cassette,” she says. “I would go to my local library and pick up cheap tapes that were being thrown out, or I’d find $2 hip-hop cassettes at gas stations, and it all made me aware of liminal sound. I was hearing the sound of the tape itself.”

Gifted a Tascam 424 multitrack recorder at 15 by her girlfriend, Zuniga recorded her surrounding environments and layered these textures with whispered vocals and gentle melodies. Inspired by the lo-fi sound of Elliot Smith’s first album Roman Candle, she developed a bank of recordings, but it wasn’t until 2025 that Zuniga decided to release her work to the public.

“I felt like the world is so oversaturated with media, and I wanted to find a way to contribute without creating more trash and clutter,” she says. “I had a general conflict with sharing my work, but once I put it out there, so many people welcomed it and I felt really grateful.”

Initially released on Bandcamp in January 2025 in a limited run of cassettes, the album soon became a crate-diggers’ favourite and caught the attention of indie songwriter Mount Eerie, who invited her on tour that summer. Now appearing on wider streaming services via AD 93, Zuniga feels inspired to continue sharing the sounds of her inner world. “I love my practice now and I want to do it all the time,” she says. “I need it like a form of care or divine connection, and to hear that other people are helped by it in the way it’s helped me is all I could ask for.”