Peter Scion - 1997 - Devachan

THE MAKING OF DEVACHAN BY PETER SCION

'Devachan' was recorded during one week in March 1997. It was a wonderful experience, on a personal level it was groundbreaking. My friend Christer Bäckhage deserves a mention here. Without him, dare I say, the album might never have happened.I had just made a few recordings of a more experimental nature. They were basically poetry readings (in Swedish) set to a sonic background, tape treatments and various noises I can't even remember the origin of. I played the tape to Christer, and he picked something up in the odd assemblage of sounds. He suggested that I should perhaps try to make a more 'psychedelic' album. It's of course hard to decide to do something 'psychedelic', since psychedelic to me is a rare quality rather than a certain style or certain sounds. It can't be calculated or planned, because it's a spiritual thing to me. It can't be explained. But I understood what he was trying to say, and later the same evening, I started recording some songs. 'Time', 'In the Forest' and 'Elizabeth Love' were the first songs recorded for what I then didn't yet know was going to be an album. All of these first songs were already finished, so I just had to get them down on tape. 'Love Song to Her Secrets' was another song written on beforehand, dating back to the Continental Soul Searchers 1992 session.Later during the sessions, I wrote several new songs. 'The Raven King', 'There Was A Goodbye', 'Johanna of My Song'--all of them emerged during that week. 'These Darkened Trees' was written during a fifteen minutes break.The title track was improvised, but sprung out of ideas I had worked with earlier, both live and at home alone with my guitar, using the DADGAD tuning. When the basic guitar track was recorded, I added harmonium, cello and the other sounds heard on the track without listening back to the guitar before overdubbing the additional instruments. I wanted to memorize as little as possible of what I played on the guitar so that I could sort of jam with myself, almost as if I jammed with other musicians.The last song recorded for 'Devachan' was another all improvised piece. I had recorded what I thought was everything I would record, but somehow, I still had the feeling that something more wanted to get out. I thought it might be a 'happy' song to round off the sessions with. It turned out to be 'Where the Wild Things Are' which is probably the spookiest thing I've ever done! Everything on it is improvised, even the vocals including the lyrics (which might explain the grammatical errors…). Recording the vocals was one of the most memorable moments during the sessions. I had no idea where it would lead me, although I still had the idea to make it less dark than a lot of the other music on the album. But then the first words came--"the child, reaches out his hand..."--and it almost scared me. The evil voices and the strange organ heard during the last half of the track wasn't actually overdubbed, they were there on the tape already when I recorded the song. I had no new, unused tapes left when inspiration struck me, so I had to use an old tape with a copy of some old recordings I had made. When I turned up the third and fourth channel just so see what was there, I heard all these eerie sounds and I just knew that they were perfect for the track.Recording 'Devachan' brought several surprises to me, some of which I just can't explain. (For instance, how on earth did my voice separate into two harmonies at once at the very last syllable of 'Johanna of My Song'?!) Mixing was done in not more than two days, most of the songs were mixed only once. Sometimes it was as if someone was standing behind me moving my fingers for me to make me do the right thing. 'Channel 4 up, number 2 down, pan to the left right there...' It was like magic. There's a word for it: intuition. That's the key word to entire album. 'Devachan' taught me a lot; it opened new doors to me, doors I didn't quite know existed.As far as creativity goes, it was like being born for the second time.

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