The music has not been running for a minute before the fight against time is already lost. Quite likely, it was never meant to be won. The way Dagmar Zuniga recorded the music for in filth your mystery is kingdom/far-smile peasant in yellow music, the end shimmers through these songs from the very beginning. Zuniga recorded her hymnal lo-fi folk on a cassette recorder. In places, the tape hiss is louder than the instruments. And so a feeling emerges that the music is eroding away directly beneath one’s ear. That naturally intensifies the nostalgia, the sense of receding into the distance, inherent in this wistful music. Every note weeps transience.
But. But one would perhaps also like to hear all this LOUD for once, without interference. The question is whether a song such as »Her Master’s Voice«, which has the beautiful painfulness of a Cindy Lee piece, would lose any of its effect if it sounded a little… better. The same goes straight after, with »A Car With No Lights On«: if that had space, if it could spill with a little volume into the halls, it would lose none of its memento-mori-ness. In fact, one might swoon even more fully, because one would forget the conceptual art.
