Whipped Cream.
Caroline Cecil, best known behind the decks as Whipped Cream, is renowned for her authentic, bassy and limitless sound that transcends stylistic borders. This can be seen in numerous tracks by the artist such as “Be Here (LA LA LA),” “All Eyes On Me,” “Light of Mine” and “Angels.” Most notably, her genre-bending style is showcased in her latest single, “The Dark.”
The track boasts haunting vocals, dark bass, tinkering synths and more. According to Cecil, the single has a personal meaning as she was learning to let go of something “extremely painful” that she cared about deeply.
“When I finally let go, going into the dark and not knowing what's next…that's the concept of the record,” she says. “It's [about] trusting and not knowing if you make the right decision.”
Cecil adds that “The Dark” is among one of her favorite songs that she has made.
Accompanying the single is a music video featuring volumetric capture technology, which was shot by over 100 cameras at Metastage Canada and co-directed by Will Selviz. The cameras captured Cecil, Jasiah and Crimson Child in real time and transported their holograms into a virtual reality environment. This created the world's highest-resolution VR music experience to date. A clip of the immersive video premiered at Vancouver International Film Festival (VIFF) in October, and, with the help of Selviz, it will next hit the road in a full-scale presentation at SXSW in Austin this March, inviting attendees to explore “The Dark” through an XR headset.
“I always had a concept to make this very, very cinematic, open field, nature, colorful vibe [music video],” the producer says.
Cecil recently added singer-songwriter to her tile, flexing her own vocals for the first time, which started in 2022. She began using voice memos after a breakup to start humming, finding that what she was producing was “poetic and beautiful” and it was helpful when going through the heartbreak she was experiencing. It was then during a studio session that her friend suggested that she use her voice.
“Since I was a kid, I wanted to be a singer,” she says. “As I got older, I made a realization [that] I can't sing in key. I can't write…I just felt like I did not offer a unique enough sound. When I was coming up as a music producer, I was assigned to a major label that forced me to be in rooms with different writers and different artists….there'd be AR sessions and the writer wasn't doing it and the artist wasn't doing it. So I by nature went into fight or flight and I learned how to write.”
According to Cecil, there is no other option for what she would have gone into work-wise. She says she always knew she would make music and visual movies.
As for advice she would give her younger self, she says she would tell herself to keep listening but shut her ears when her intuition told her something was right.
“If your intuition has some feeling to open a book or to follow that one song, even though it didn't get lots of plays, maybe you met the next producer that you're going make a Grammy with,” Cecil says. “A lot of crazy things have happened and I think it's following your intuition and trusting yourself—you know best.”
