The works of Thierry Pécou have brought something back into contemporary European music that had almost been forgotten: the sound of Latin America.
Thierry Pécou is French, and his Latin America is the product of a creative fantasy that grew out of a desire to explore the nearly extinct pre-Colombian cultures of Central and South America. Any assumption, however, that these are simply the exotic longings of a European culture tourist would be false. Pécou, who grew up in a Paris suburb and graduated from the Paris Conservatory, has Caribbean ancestors, and so his musical search for roots is also a personal journey of discovery. He is at home in two cultures. One is the culture of career and daily life; the other continues to exist only as a projection arising from the depths of the individual personality – a world which, not only for Pécou himself, has become impossibly distant in a cultural and historical sense.
Thierry Pécou’s dreamed landscapes of sound can also be seen as an expression of this search for the ruins of a lost culture. With ritualistic repetitive structures, mysterious depths, and strongly physical sounds, his music conjures up an archaic past, but the colours he uses are those of a symphony orchestra, even though these colours are often placed in unusual or exotic constellations.
