In 2012, Cecil attended the long-running (now defunct) Sasquatch! Music Festival, held at The Gorge Amphitheatre in Washington state. “I had to be dragged, really dragged, there, by a best friend,” she recalls. “And that was where I saw my first electronic show.” There were two specific performances that began to reshape Cecil’s life. The first was courtesy of Patrick Grossi, the singer, songwriter, and producer better known as Active Child, who released his debut album, the soundscape-ish R&B-meets-dubstep opus ‘You Are All I See’, the previous year. She still cites Grossi as an influence.

“That was the ‘aha’ moment,” she says, but it was another show at the festival, this one from the British electronic prog-EDM trio NERO, that sealed the deal. “NERO in a tent, like an actual rave — that made me go ‘Whoa’,” she says. “I had never experienced anything like that at all. I was like, ‘What is this? This is insane!’ Something just turned on in me and I thought, ‘this is it’ — even though I had no real music background, and didn’t even know anyone who was doing this. It was like I walked into a room and God was like, ‘This is your path!’ From that day on, I was so different, It was actually really weird.” 

With the same obsessive focus she had undoubtedly brought to figure skating, she buckled down and got at it. She took her call center savings and picked up Ableton and FL Studio, before settling on the former as her main DAW for its relative ease of use. (She’s now proficient in Ableton, FL Studio and lots more, needless to say). “I quit my job, and I broke up with my boyfriend, and kind of actually broke up with everybody in a very friendly, loving way,” she says. “I realised that it was going to be a lot of work— and I don’t even know how to speak the language. I thought I needed a couple of months, but it ended up being two years away from everyone, just in my bedroom learning how to do this. I wanted to do it so bad.”

She’d also picked up a Traktor S4 controller, and began to master DJing. “I definitely learned to DJ first,” Cecil says. “That came a lot quicker. I would go on YouTube, and I was really into people like Bauer and RL Grime and DJ Slink and Swizzy Mac. But really, I didn’t know anything about making music. All I knew is that I could feel it. So I literally would type into YouTube something like ‘how to make a trap beat.’ I would just pause it and press play, pause it and press play, trying to figure it out. It was kind of ridiculous, but that’s how I learned.”