How do you feel when being compared to archetypes?

It’s a shallow thing, but we actually take some social icons and recreate them. For example, a dandy is someone with a fortune to spend. I am not a dandy, I’m more like an anti-hero; but I put on a dandy’s clothes and have fun like he does. I make a B-class movie with fragments of a super production. People do like it!

Do you think that the excessive weight of appearance is the disease of our times?

Well, Oscar Wilde said that looks can’t fool you. If you know how to read them, you get to know the truth. A beggar enters the bar and asks him for money, he makes a little gesture with his head and the man leaves peacefully. A girl who sells flowers follows and offers him a bouquet. He nods and whispers a bare “no, darling” to her. She smiles. I smile. He may be from another time. His manners and personality radiate respect, and everyone senses that.

Why lounge music?

Well, our parents heard it and once we get to be beyond the criticism to our parents, we begin to share some tastes with them. Lounge music is comfortable to talk about certain things. The paranoids can learn to actually hear something that way. My fantasy of a masterpiece is that who has two levels of reading.

How did you meet the girls of Baccarat?

In 1994, I was posing nude for a group of art students. I needed the money and the artist Marcia Schwartz, a very good friend of mine, offered me to pose at one of her classes. Adriana Vazquez was one of the students and I incorporated her to the group. Before her, Baccarat was a solo project: me and a sampler, until I met the girls. The other girl, Vanessa Strauch, is a clothes designer and an actress, she loves the aesthetics of Hollywood in the forties. She came into the group two years ago.

How did you choose the name of the group?

I like it because it sounds elegant and local at the same time. It’s related to glamorous games and crystal.

What do you like about Buenos Aires?

I like the city itself, the architecture is beautiful, and the bohemian romanticism. A so called culture, coffee houses tradition, people and artists who reunite in coffees. I also like tango and melancholy. A former elegance that used to exist. In BA, people look superior but they are very sad.

Pangaro’s music is a combination of elegance and comic related subtleness. It’s a sound that transports you into a lost Belle Epoque. From references to technology, lounge music and tango remembrances, Baccarat songs resume one of the visions of our corner of the world.

After leaving the bar, I realize that Buenos Aires looks more melancholic than ever. While I wait for the bus I feel the cold traveling through me in sudden waves. The lights look slightly different tonight, I get to look at them with a poet’s eye, some of the musician’s romantic thoughts keep sounding at the back of my head. I feel I belong to this place, no matter how dark it may seem at night.