DEVACHAN (Peter Scion 1997)

After a few musical miscarriages, "Devachan" came to me as my firstborn album. As my debut, it will always have a special place in my heart. It also seems to me that this is the record of mine that people like the most.

I have to thank my dear friend Christer Bäckhage for setting this weird thing into motion. After hearing some of my earlier recordings, he suggested that I should go all the way and try to make something more psychedelic. That pulled the plug. Or rather, that broke the levee. As soon as I started recording, I couldn't tape enough songs. It took only a week to finish the entire album, but more songs were coming which eventually made up the two albums that followed it.

Whether "Devachan" is psychedelic or not is up to other people to decide, but it was definitely a trip into my own mind at the time. Listening to it is listening to someone slightly lost in and baffled by his own creativity, somewhere between a slightly uncomfortable past and an unknown future. And so "Devachan" is the perfect title for the album. The word is Sanskrit for the place where the soul dwells after death but before rebirth. That's where you found me as an artist in early 1997.

The name "Scion" came from a headline in a British music magazine (and not from the Ian Matthews song that some have believed). I liked the meaning of it although I was a bit uncomfortable with its sound to begin with. But the name stuck, and soon I was as much the Scion persona as I was the ordinary, everyday me. Actually, when I became Peter Scion I became more of my real self, because Peter Scion could say things I couldn't.

Before my friend Lars Holmquist founded the "kitchen table label" Domestica (simply because he thought the album was so good that he wanted it out in some way, even if he had to do it himself), I sent out a tape with a three track selection to various record labels in Europe. I got only one reply, a year or so later. I can't remember now who from, but he had suddenly found the tape behind a shelf, forgetting he had recieved it in the first place. Now he had listened to it, and was interested in releasing "Devachan" on his label. "Sure," I wrote to him. I never heard from him again.

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