I’d like to be erudite and tell you exactly what Recoilette means, but I can’t and the best Mr Google can offer me from French (which it sounds like) into English is retoilette, which sounds interesting. The translation from Finnish however is ‘you recoil’, which is even more interesting.
He (Jukka Paajanen to be precise) is something of a musical polymath too, having composed and performed with groups in various genres, from death metal to synth-pop, his versatile style being cinematic yet escapist, and somewhat at odds with the artistically binary world we inhabit.
Subjected as a child to his father’s impressive collection of 1960s and 70s vinyl albums, his early influences were inter alia Pink Floyd and the ELO, their psychedelic and melancholic styles swaying his selection of minor chords in his early work and which persists today.
He says, “My goal as a musician is to deliver the feelings of re-imagined timelessness” and language like also hinted at some symphonic metal influences, too. As it turned out, alas, there were none.
The most intriguing comment he makes in his homemade, informative press release is that he “explores the archived emotional crossroads where Twin Peaks meets Nordic noir…since the 90’s, his music has been shaped by a built-in wistful, yet bittersweet layer on top of a darker undertone.”
We have featured several artists who are at that particular crossroads; it must be a busy one, I hope they’ve got a traffic light system in place. It’s all very enticing.
With respect to this single, ‘Venus and the Moon’ he explains that he explores the feeling of alienation and the associated conflicts through the experiences in nature and that he tackles it by solo hiking, which is “comparable to a spiritual experience, where things become clearer in a larger context.”
Alternatively he will wander around big cities, people watching.
The music emerged out of an encounter with a river in northern Norway (no detail is offered!) while the lyrics were prompted by the conjunction of Venus and the Moon early in 2023 (actually I recall that myself, wasn’t Jupiter involved in that line up as well?
(If you look close enough you might just see Jukka).
So what have we got? Versatility; cross-genre; cinematic; psychedelic; melancholic; timelessness; solitude; alienation. It sounds like one of those highbrow psychological tests to pinpoint what sort of job you’re good at.
What I hear is a sort of soft electro-pop ballad, a Pink Floyd-lite experience and it isn’t too hard to picture Arnold Layne wandering around in this odd vision of nature and cityscape that he paints, of simultaneous separation and integration; contrasts that are as different as chalk and cheese while bonded by being both being parts of “this same disjointed mess”.
That’s a pretty quick, loose interpretation of the song’s meaning. You can read whatever you like into it, including exactly what Venus and the Moon represent and what they are a jointly a catalyst to.
Musically, he knows how to retain your attention with pleasant but undemanding melodies (which seem to lack the surfeit of minor keys I was expecting) while spicing it up with various noises off like little synth-generated laughs that remind me very much of the style of Sweden’s Skott, my go-to analogy for that sort of thing.
Recoilette is currently finishing up the rest of the songs for an EP that is to be released later in 2024.
Find him on:
Website: https://www.recoilette.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/recoilette
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/recoilette_official/
