Teen Dream
Ring My Bell

Cute Heels is the solo project of Victor Lenis, the Brussels based founder of Black Leather Records and a producer who will be familiar to fans of Gooiland Elektro. Spend some time with Spiritual, the debut Cute Heels album and you'll realise Lenis is a perfect fit for San Francisco's relentless Dark Entries label. All eight tracks here were written and recorded throughout the course of 2013 and present Cute Heels as a powerful musical force wedged between EBM and primitive strains of Detroit electro and techno. If you can imagine James Stinson jamming on hardware with Beate Bartel then you're in the right frame of mind to appreciate the nuances of Spiritual.E

Picture the scene if you can. It’s Sunday evening at the Meakusma Festival, 2019. A small audience (in varying states of inebriation and recovery) sit patiently on the floor, drenched in soft sunlight. Fizzy Veins is set up to play - his guitar resting on his knees while he stares into his laptop with an expression displaying amusement and fear in equal measure. He tentatively speaks into the microphone. There’s a lot of reverb. I don’t think anybody has the slightest idea what he’s saying. I assume he’s delivering a joke, but it’s very hard to tell. People laugh. After yet more tweaks to his gear he starts to play some loose, bendy phrases on the guitar, and we are all gently vaporised up Mount Effervescent. Our benevolent guru sits at the peak, speaking in tongues to the freshly formed congregation. The beats start to roll out and the sun begins to set in the evening sky. Fizzy transitions and he continues his long distance narration from deep inside his own reverb. It sounds like he’s in another room. On another planet, more like. Witnessing the show, as I did, left me wondering how he even manages to boot-up his computer.. let alone produce an album as brilliantly formed and coherent as this!