Vertical Vignettes

Celebrating the 100th release on London's Kit Records, The Hague artist — and overseer of the esteemed Plafond and Rubber imprints — Ruben Verkuylen squints through the telescope to reveal a high-rise debut tape of constructivist electronics and domestic bricolage, as The Social Lover.

Vertical Vignettes looms benevolently like a cutaway apartment block of overlapping lives and skintled brickwork. These are less songs than scenes; inspired in equal measure by Jacques Tati's 'Playtime' and Georges Perec's 'Life: A User's Manual', Verkuylen constructs a kind of sonic dollhouse, with each track offering a striking glimpse of parallel living arrangements and peculiar domestic rituals.

A baby's scattered toys; a hand groping in the liquor cabinet; care and attention spent on a magnificent fruit tart. There is a mischievous logic to these tableaux: a sense of interconnected miniatures set in motion by the smallest gesture. Like Tati's intricately choreographed cityscapes, apparent chaos conceals a web of intimate connections. Incidental details assume unlikely significance.

Verkuylen plays the benevolent voyeur - peering through windows and listening at walls, finding poetry in oddments of sonic furniture, the detritus of human existence. Pompous eccentrics, half-dreaming neighbours. Someone stirs beneath drawn curtains. A muffled gathering pours into the small hours. Outside, seagulls squabble as they peck at a mound of ice.

Recommended if you like Joseph Shabason, Or Sobre Blau, Loto Retina, the Chevance series.