The Social Lover

Celebrating the 100th release on Kit, The Hague artist — and overseer of esteemed Plafond and Rubber imprints — Ruben Verkuylen squints through the telescope to reveal a high-rise debut of constructivist electronics and domestic bricolage, as The Social Lover. 'Vertical Vignettes' looms 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 presents a kind of sonic dollhouse — each track offering a striking glimpse of parallel living arrangements and peculiar private rituals.

A baby's scattered toys; a hand groping in the liquor cabinet; care and attention spent on a magnificent fruit tart. Like Tati's intricately choreographed cityscapes, there is a mischievous logic to these tableaux: a sense of interconnected miniatures set in spidered motion by the smallest gesture. Verkuylen plays the benevolent voyeur — peering through windows and listening at walls, finding poetry in oddments of 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.