Pecou's works combine driving rhythms and imaginative textures with strong Latin American influences. This engrossing selection, especially his Tremendum, conveys his exuberant writing.

One element of his music-making that underlines the affinity is a freshness, an aversion to rules – on the strength of the works here he shares something of the if-it’s-fun-I’ll-include-it attitude of the more orthodox composers like Villa-Lobos and Chavez

Pécou’s music is founded on a few well-defined principles. It is pulse-based. It is unashamed about dwelling on simple melodic cells. It grows through repetition and contrast, rather than metamorphosis. And it passionately and infectiously embraces the musics of South and Central America.

French-Caribbean composer Thierry Pécou draws on both the musical stylings and the myths of South American culture in these works..his percussion interplay driving along...with an insistence that recalls not just Reich and Glass, but also the batucada percussion ensembles of Brazilian carnivals. Absorbing.

Pécou delights in music which is jagged, ritualistic – he dreams of “making the whole world resonate.” And this encapsulates exactly what’s so startling about several of the pieces collected on this second Harmonia Mundi anthology – they don’t sound composed at all, more like field recordings collected by an intrepid ethnomusicologist.