Playful, Raw, Mystical Music
Alice Celeste is a name I gave myself for my musician alter ego.
Alice Celeste (Nicole Sylvia Javorsky) is a singer-songwriter and multidisciplinary artist based in New York City. She makes music that centers on emotion and storytelling. Her rule-breaking kind of unbridled and soulful expression makes way for vast experimentation in how she uses her voice, along with the piano and guitar.
Her commitment to stay true to the emotional experience of her songs leads directly to the fluctuations in rhythm and composition that are often features of her music. In fact, many of her songs are completely improvised, or contain elements that are improvisational.
Similar to how she makes her paintings, drawings, and mixed media works, Alice creates playful, raw, and mystical music through tapping into the possibility of the present moment. She makes a conscious decision to center her creative work in the right here, right now.
Alice has released eight albums and seven EPs exploring existential questions, healing from sexual abuse, the complex beauty and pain of choosing to heal and break cycles, and more. She has performed at venues such as Rockwood Music Hall, Pictor Gallery, and Clio Art Fair.
You can find my music on Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube, or anywhere you listen by searching for Alice Celeste.
Released on February 28, 2024: “From Infinity”
What is intuition anyway? I have a soul, don’t I? Where do I come from? What am I? What are we? What does it all mean? Oh what does it mean?
“from infinity” is about wrestling with existential questions and trying to make peace with uncertainty. It’s a song that’s a salve for the disorientation that can come with acknowledging the open questions of our existence. But it’s also a song that allows you to sit with the infinite “I don’t know”s out there and feel a sense of awe, expansiveness, magic, beauty, and maybe even peace in the questions themselves.
I am here! I won’t hide what I’ve been holding inside!
Watch me sing from my soul …
Improvisation, vocal and piano outdoors
From my Dec. 3, 2023 performance at Rockwood Music Hall in New York City
Radically Pure
I struggle with shame a lot. I’m a survivor of abuse, sexual assault, anorexia, etc. These are hard things to survive and yet I have more times than I’d like to admit when I feel weak, when I feel like I should hide myself, when I feel beyond repair and very ashamed. There’s a part of me that doesn’t feel like I’m enough as this beautiful, soulful, naturally flawed, and human self. There’s a part of me that’s afraid to be okay with who I am because it feels more familiar to live with toxic shame than to live with the truth.
My album radically pure is a collection of songs that I improvised in the moment and that emphasize the subtleties and in-between shades of my voice and the guitar that we often don’t give as much space to in “finished” songs. I made space for cracks in the voice, vocal fry, breathy sounds that dissolve into the guitar vibrations, pauses, stretching and compressing rhythm/time, using the guitar as simply an object to make sound as if approaching it for the first time, improvised lyrics and sounds, shifts that transition abruptly, shifts that muddle into something new slowly, etc.
(My live performances of the same name — Radically Pure — follow in this spirit of experimentation and being fully present in the moment, improvising with singing and guitar, naturally expressing myself in the here and now.)