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!

"GENTLY JOHNNY" ON YOUTUBE

Thanks to "strange137", my recording of "Gently Johnny" (as found on "Devachan") is up on Youtube. I had no idea someone had posted it until my fiance told me about it. Appreciation goes out to strange137 for spreading my music!

TREE MUSIC WEBSIDE DEAD...?

It seems that the original Peter Scion website, Tree Music, has gone down. I wasn't the web master, and I have no idea what happened, perhaps Yahoo pulled it for some reason. Anyway, as it seems, this blog will be the main source for information on my past (but not very likely present) doings. At least until I figure out what happened.

It's a bit sad if it actually is defunct, because all my lyrics were kept there, plus plenty of other written work, and due to a number of reasons, I have no other copies of it... (And before you point it out to me: I know, it's stupid of me not to keep a better backup of my own work.)

THE PECULIAR SOUNDS OF PETER SCION: A NEWCOMER'S INTRODUCTION (1989-2005)

With so many albums of mine available here, you might find it hard to decide what to download unless you're already familiar with my music. Therefore I have compiled an album of 2CD's length covering every album I've made, including group efforts from Modryn, Continental Soul Searchers, and Pangolin.

It's always hard to make compilations of your own work, and my opinion is that the artists themselves rarely are the best persons to decide what material is appropriate to include. Had someone else put together a Peter Scion "best of" or "introduction" styled album, it might have looked very different. I have however tried to shed light on as many different styles I thought necessary, why this introduction swings wildly from dark folk to country music to heavy rock to... Well, you get the point. However, this isn't meant to be a cohesive album, just the introduction the title suggests.

For quick download, it's available only in slightly lesser quality mp3's. If you have an irresistable urge to get this music in better quality after messing up your mind with these selections, I humbly advise you to choose the regular albums.

DOWNLOAD DISC 1
DOWNLOAD DISC 2

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.

MP3:
DOWNLOAD PART 1
DOWNLOAD PART 2

WAV:
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TREE MUSIC (Peter Scion 1997)

I can't remember really how "Tree Music" came about. From what I recall now, it just seemed to happen. After "Devachan", I kept recording, and I suddenly had enough material to fill a 90 minute tape. About half of that material was structured as "The Amethyst Dream". At one point, Lars at Domestica and I talked about releasing "The Amethyst Dream" together with "Devachan" as a box set of sorts including "Tree Music". The idea was scrapped, but suddenly we had another album ready for release. "Tree Music" and "The Amethyst Dream" were released simultaneously.

The odd thing about "Tree Music" is that it seems to have a theme of its own. All the songs deal, in one way or another, with nature. The unintentional concept album! It is also by far the strangest album of mine, with "Willow Moon" being the off-beat centrepiece. (And off tune too for that matter...) There's also a new version of "These Darkened Trees" which is the perfect example of how not to make a record. I had just bought myself a cheap sitar, and with fearlessness bordering on sheer stupidity, I decided to play a very long solo on said sitar. I also turned it up pretty loud in the mix, so that no-one would miss it... Those were the days! Anyway, this arrangement (bar the sitar!) became the foundation for subsequent takes on the song, including the one with Pangolin.

This is indeed one freak of an album, and perhaps that's an appeal of its own. At least one person I know has cited "Tree Music" as his favourite Peter Scion album... Another friend of mine had a good laugh when he heard "The Flower of My Secret Garden" for the first time. "What a freaky song!" he said, probably with equal parts of joy and fear... "Tree Music" seems to generate odd reactions.

The album cover was a shameless tribute to the ESP Disk' aesthetics. I love the homemade feel of their covers; that simple, stark black and white look that seemed to signal an urge to express oneself. I could easily relate to that, and although I no longer make music myself, I still can.

MP3:
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WAV:
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