Bandcamp Sauvageoness is a Swiss solo project, all songs written and performed by a single artist working out of Bunker Paradize in Renens. A Maze Deep In, released May 22 across five labels (Araki Records, Atypeek Music, Charogne Records, Table Basse Records, Urgence Disk Records — the kind of multi-label co-release that signals real Swiss-French underground network involvement), is the debut vinyl LP. Fourteen tracks. The Bandcamp framing names the genre cross directly: “doomed industrial dream pop,” merging “indie noise, shoegaze, and post-punk with the raw intensity of black metal.”
What makes the album worth attention before the first riff lands is the mix-and-master credit: Jack Shirley at the Atomic Garden in Oakland. Shirley is the engineer behind Deafheaven’s entire catalogue from Sunbather onwards, plus Soft Kill, Drug Church, Loma Prieta, hundreds of post-metal/shoegaze/heavy-indie records that have come out of his studio across the last decade and a half. That a Swiss solo project lands at Atomic Garden for the mix-and-master is itself a statement about the album’s ambitions; that Shirley’s signature dynamic-and-spatial-restraint shows up across the runtime is the album’s defining production decision.
Fourteen Pieces of Atmosphere
The track-naming pattern is unusual and worth flagging — RD E|A, Tell me, Mary, RD Paradise, Road_ise Cherubin, Show Me Your Body, mio stars at the end, DOPE, What to love, make you so, CRANES, Rather in Harmony, RD Indusbeast, Ex Voto Ardent. The “RD” prefix on several tracks suggests a series within the album; the mix of English, French, Italian and abstract-symbol titles tracks the album’s deliberate genre-and-language fluidity.
“RD E|A” opens the record in heavy-shoegaze-with-doom-weight mode: cathedral-reverb guitars, sub-bass foundation, drums sat deep in the room, ethereal multi-tracked clean vocals embedded into the texture rather than placed above it. “Tell me” and “Mary” establish the album’s main vocabulary — dream-pop-into-dirge with the harsh-edged moments tempered by the predominantly clean vocal approach. “mio stars at the end” (one of the singles) pulls into the album’s most accessible territory; “DOPE” at the album’s centre is the heaviest cut and the closest to the “doomed” half of the project’s self-description.
“CRANES” and “Rather in Harmony” (also a single) sit in the back half’s most polished production mode, with synth-bass weight and clean-vocal layering at its widest. “RD Indusbeast” earns its title — programmed industrial-leaning rhythmic backbone, the album’s most overtly mechanical track. “Ex Voto Ardent” closes the record in its most expansive shoegaze-doom mode, the kind of long-tail closer that ties the album’s stylistic threads together.
The Shirley Mastering
What distinguishes A Maze Deep In from most contemporary doom/shoegaze hybrids is the production restraint Shirley’s work consistently brings. Across the fourteen tracks the album avoids brick-walled mastering — the dynamic argument actually has room to develop, the cathedral-reverb spatial decisions register cleanly, the clean vocal layering carries spatial depth rather than getting flattened into a wall. The cost is the usual one for this kind of mix: the heaviest passages occasionally accumulate low-mid frequency stacking, the rhythm-section presence is sacrificed to atmosphere on the most explicitly dream-pop tracks, and the harsh-edged moments stay relatively rare in service of the album’s overall melancholic-dream-pop register.
The album’s category-defying nature is its main asset and its hardest-to-position quality. A Maze Deep In won’t fit cleanly in either a doom-metal-zine review pile or a shoegaze-blog feature; it lives in the productive space between them, which the project’s framing makes explicit. For listeners working that genre-cross — Deafheaven’s Sunbather-to-Infinite Granite trajectory, Soft Kill’s post-punk catalogue, Mütterlein’s solo project, the wider doom-shoegaze ecosystem — A Maze Deep In is the kind of debut that earns immediate attention.
Fourteen tracks, written and performed by Sauvageoness, recorded at Bunker Paradize (Renens) and Atomic Garden (Oakland), mixed and mastered by Jack Shirley at Atomic Garden. Mix philosophy is consistently atmosphere-prioritising: cathedral-reverb guitar textures, sub-bass foundation (often synthetic on the more industrial cuts), drums sat deep in the room with limited transient definition, predominantly clean multi-tracked female vocals embedded into the wall as textural layer rather than placed above it. The production decision that defines the album is Shirley’s dynamic-and-spatial-restraint: mastering loudness is contemporary but not brick-walled, the dynamic argument across the longer pieces (RD E|A, Ex Voto Ardent) has room to develop, the spatial decisions register cleanly. Frequency stacking in the low-mids is the standing trade-off on the densest passages — where bass-and-rhythm-guitar blur into a single textural band. The mechanical/industrial passages (“RD Indusbeast,” parts of “DOPE”) have the sharpest transient processing on the album; the shoegaze-leaning tracks (“CRANES,” “Rather in Harmony”) have the widest stereo layering. Vocal placement consistent across the runtime as wall-embedded texture rather than as foregrounded lead.
Standout tracks: Ex Voto Ardent for the closer’s expansive shoegaze-doom synthesis that ties the album’s stylistic threads. DOPE for the album’s heaviest centrepiece and most successful “doomed” moment. RD E|A for the opener’s setting-of-terms cathedral-reverb-doom vocabulary.
Recommended without reservation if you live in the doom-shoegaze hybrid territory and appreciate a debut that takes the Jack Shirley production credit seriously. A Maze Deep In is the kind of Swiss solo-project debut where the artistic vision is already fully formed — fourteen tracks, multiple labels, internationally-recognised mix-and-master credit, a category-defying genre cross that the album executes rather than merely promises.
