Orquoy / Changó / Marcha de la Humanidad

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 colors he uses are those of a symphony orchestra, even though these colors are often placed in unusual or exotic constellations.

“My position is somewhat ambiguous, because I am a European, even though I have certain roots in these places [Central America]. At the same time, I also want to better understand the Mexican people and their history, for example, and hopefully contribute to the search for their own truth and their own roots.” (Thierry Pécou)

Co-production: Radio France, 2013 /