Pink Reason

In the four years since Siltbreeze released Pink Reason’s Cleaning the Mirror, Kevin DeBroux’s subsequent singles and EPs have been concise, individual statements, together charting an atlas of depression and the struggles with a darkness that threaten to swallow him up every day. Compressed into Debroux’s five- and six-minute songs are weeks, months and years of labor and experience, not the least of which are his travels to places where he catalyzed and received underground energies—from Wisconsin and Ohio, through Melbourne and Santiago de Chile, to New York City. Try to map out how these songs are put together, and one finds that the apparent simplicity of DeBroux’s riffs and chord progressions gives way to an epic complexity. Now that the dust is settling and the commercial concerns of a thousand “lo-fi” projects have vacated the underground for a better life in the dorm rooms of America, the influence of Cleaning the Mirror on the past half-decade is clear. And DeBroux is still here, using cheap technology, creating rich, enveloping psychological environments, giving voice to a restless inner life—manifesting drum-and-bass beats, hardcore dissonance, Ian MacCulloch’s larynx—and blooming like sunflowers amid the debris.