DEAR FELLOW TRAVELLERS!

You are about to enter the curious universe of Peter Scion, and I bid you welcome!

WHY A PETER SCION BLOG?

While trodding the outbacks of internet, I've found there's a lingering interest in the music I made about ten years ago. Every now and then, I bump into places where you can download my albums, and I think it's great! I eagerly advocate such activities by anyone who finds it worth to sustain the interest in the songs I once wrote. However, I see that some people ask for more of my music, since my albums are virtually impossible to find. They had a limited distribution already upon their release, and as all of them were CD-R:s, I suspect they have a limited second hand appeal.

Therefore I have decided to upload my entire back catalogue for anyone who is interested in it. It's all for free, it's all legal - you may download as much as you like. If you want to leave a comment, it is much appreciated but I'm not one of these people who beg for response. It is all up to you what you prefer to do, and it's all fine by me. However, if you have any problems with the downloads, I encourage you to drop me a line so that I can fix it.

WHY GIVE AWAY THE MUSIC FOR FREE?

First of all, I want to make my music easily available to anyone who cares about it. I've never had any illusions making big bucks from it anyway. I also fully grasp the importance of free music: I am, or at least I was, a more or less invisible artist on the fringes of the music world, and if I want to keep my music alive and want it to reach potential new listeners, this is the only sensible way to go.

And so, there's also a slightly political side to it: With the current international inquisition against filesharing, I want to take a stand against the furious hunt for music fans all over the world. Therefore, it is free for anyone to download my albums, and in turn publish them on blogs or share them through other filesharing channels. THIS MUSIC WAS BORN A FREE SPIRIT AND IT WANTS TO REMAIN THAT WAY! However, if you plan to use my music for commercial or profitable purposes, I eagerly advise you to get in touch with me first. I consider that a fair deal.

WHAT'S HERE?

Aside from all the regular albums, you will find lots of albums that are previously unreleased. Back in the day when I was a compulsive recording artist, I filled tapes and tapes and tapes of music, and quite a lot of it has remained unreleased until now, or released to a handful of people only. I know there are more songs tucked away in some boxes somewhere, and if I'm in a particularly archaeological mood some day, I will dig through it all and have it digitalized. Until then, I hope these offers will keep you going for a while.

Although you can find many outtakes and rejected recordings on this blog already, I will add a previously unreleased (or hens' teeth rare) song each month. These "hens' teeth" will be posted here.

Some of the albums here have been, well remastered is too strong a word, but I have at least tried to polish away the most ear-wrenching noises from the recordings which I thought needed it. I'm not a technical wiz by any stretch, and the equipment used for cleaning up the sound is certainly rudimentary to the serious hi-fi freak. But then again, my music was never aimed at the sound buffs; it was all recorded under the pressures of insufficient technology. That was a challenge I eagerly accepted; when recording, I made no difference between limitations and possibilities. With only four channels (rarely more than that) I often had to come up with unorthodox solutions to creative problems.

The albums appear on the blog grouped by artist (solo albums first) in the order they were recorded. The "hens' teeth" will be published last, as said above. For easy navigation, use the "Blog archive" section to the right.

HOW TO DOWNLOAD

Downloading is easy. You just click on the download links following the comments to each album. You have two options; either you choose the MP3 alternative for 320 kbit/s mp3's, or you choose the high quality WAV version. The MP3's are stored at Mediafire, providing quick and parallell downloads with no passwords needed. WAV:s are downloaded from Megaupload. All files come as regular rar files and are easy to decompress.

Unfortunately, for the time being, there are no CD covers included with the downloads. I hope to provide them at a later stage. There are however info documents to go along with each album.

WHERE TO START?

There's a pretty voluminous amount of albums found in this blog, and perhaps you don't know where to begin? If you want a quick career overview, I have created a special newcomer's introduction named after this blog, and you can find it below, before the original albums.

Listening to all the music I made in the past forced me to re-evaluate a lot of it. Instead of hearing the pain and anguish which often inspired me to lay down a song, I hear a fair bit of creativity. It's been great fun going through all this weirdness a decade after it was made. This Peter Scion guy was some crazy guy, but he had one or two bright moments after all. :-)

FINALLY, A CLARIFICATION

There's a faulty piece of information floating around on the internet. There's a cover of the Pink Floyd song "Julia Dream" included in the huge Syd Barrett bootleg compilation "Have You Got It Yet". The track is attributed to Drekka, Ring, The Iditarod and me. I did tour with these nice lads and lassies, but I never played on "Julia Dream". This false piece of information of course brings my name up in plenty of places, and I assume it's good for spreading the name. But, I did not play on it!

And now the ceremony is about to begin...

SIGNS OF LIFE

This blog has been asleep for so long I can't come up with any other excuse than that time just flew by and other things happened. Business as usual, then.

I've noticed that some links are dead, which indeed demands correction. I plan to deal with this in the coming weeks, but then again, I've made promises before without being able to keep them, so don't expect too much...

There are some new "bootlegs" in the making, similar in concept to the "Time Vaults" set by Pangolin. In other words, more rehearsals and live tapes found in the closet some six months ago. Sound quality varies but there are a few tapes I think are worth hearing just the same.

On a completely different note, I was shocked to hear about Captain Beefheart's passing not long ago. He's a true hero of mine, and although it was obvious he'd never return to music making, his death brought me down. So many great talents are gone now.

Anyway, I'm still here and hopefully you are too.

Take care,
Peter

"LOST ALBUM" NOW AVAILABLE

"Sombre Trust" is finally available for download! It's an album of 15 songs found in the closet and forgotten about. Recorded some time in 1999 and 2000 (some parts of it might have been recorded even earlier), it should have been the follow-up to "Through My Ghost". A decade later you can find it here.

HERE WE GO AGAIN!

Things are moving here again! First of all I have updated the Hens' Teeth section - five previously unreleased song. As usual, they can be found here (scroll down to the end of the post). There are now fifteen Hens' Teeth available for download, and I'm beginning to think it's getting a bit unwieldy. I sometimes think that perhaps I should collect all tracks posted up to now as one single download, but that might give someone the feeling it's a proper album which it isn't. It is just a bunch of wildly disparate songs. Anyway.

The second new installment here is a compilation of Pangolin rehearsal. It's called "Time Vaults" - spot the reference! Those who fancy primitive recordings to outcrude any old garage band have to check that one out. Grab it here and read all about it. For the first time, I have included a cover in the rar file. I'm not sure it will work properly when you print it - I don't have much experience of pixels & centimeters, so please let me know if it could be done better. The cover is, as you'll see, a shameless tribute to bootlegs of the olden days.

That's all for now. It's 6.30 in the morning and I have a strange feeling I should go to bed.

MYSPACE SPACED OUT

MySpace keeps giving me a hard time. I just can't get it to work, it just behaves so strange. I wish I could reply to comments but it doesn't seem to work. Must be a cosmic bug. So, if anyone comes from there to here, apologies if it seems I don't care about comments because I do.

RAIDING THE ARCHIVES!

The heavy, creaking iron door moaned, and with a wave of my hand, I removed the dangling cobwebs sticking to my face. At the end of the long corridor, I found a sealed, heavy box. I wiped the moist off it, broke the lock and opened the box. There, inside, were rows of tapes, stored safely from intruders, forgotten by time. Hours and hours of unreleased Peter Scion recordings right before my eyes.

Well, actually, I opened the closet door and with some effort, I took down a cardboard box which indeed contained several hours of unreleased material. I had forgotten what a lot of it actually was; there were 4 track masters, rehearsal tapes, live recordings and outtakes, all in one jumbled up hodge-podge of tiny plastic boxes from the days before mp3's. The most striking find must be an entire, previously unreleased album recorded around 2000. I had a faint notion of some of the songs, but I was far from sure there were so many that they make up a whole album. I am already in the process of digitalizing the tapes, and this album will be made available in the near future here on the blog.

The rest of the material, spread over an amount of circa 70 tapes will also be released, at least in parts. Some of it has less than acceptable sound quality, but some of it sounds OK. I'm quite excited about these discoveries, and it will be a pleasure to share the best of them with you!