We had to learn how to make music with computers, and it took us so long to do that.” But we’ve been able to cheat our way with things. We’re too old for computers to ever be natural for us, and they are too young to know everything. We didn’t know that 10, 20 years later the world would change very fast. I remember when I was young there was no cellphones and no Internet and we were all very happy.

“Sometimes that’s depressing, but we at least have the advantage of age. “We meet a lot of young composers who are a lot better than us technically on computers,” he says, on his cellphone and speaking with a Parisian-cool accent. But reached at a tour stop in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, violinist and programmer Hugues Payen suggests that sometimes sonic appearances can be deceiving. The Paris-based electroswing outfit makes finding the right balance between the old and the new sound effortless. The brilliance of the band’s third and latest album, Robot Faces, is that it’s hard to know whether to reach for a Mary Pickford cocktail or the Molly, the songs fusing mammoth house beats and trance-heavy synths with hot-jazz horns and Prohibition-era vocals. Caravan Palace is in love with the soundtrack to the Roaring ’20s as it is obsessed with the new millennium’s most banging of genres. As marriages go, it’s a decidedly unlikely one.

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