Playful, Raw, Mystical Music

Alice Celeste is a name I gave myself for my musician alter ego.

Alice Celeste is a singer-songwriter and multidisciplinary artist (Nicole Sylvia Javorsky) based in New York City. Her unbridled, soulful performances make way for vast experimentation in how she uses her voice, along with the piano and guitar.

She makes a conscious decision to center her creative work in the right here, right now, creating playful, raw, and mystical music through tapping into the possibility of the present moment. Her songs have been described as a folk-indie-pop blend oscillating between soothing vocals and explosions of vulnerable emotional expression. At her live shows, after performing her original songs, she often opens it up to audience members, asking them to contribute phrases to which she makes up a song right then and there.

Through music, she asks: What does it mean to be alive? What is existence? Why does it seem the truest answers are I don't know and the questions themselves? How do we heal? How do we break cycles of abuse and violence? How do I cope with grief? How do I make peace with pain? How do I find a way to follow the little voice inside of me that already knows the way through the darkness?

Alice has released eight albums and seven EPs exploring existential questions and her spiritual connection to nature, her healing process from sexual abuse and PTSD, the complex beauty and pain of choosing to heal and break cycles, and more. She has performed her music at venues such as Rockwood Music Hall, Brooklyn Music Kitchen, St. George Theatre, Pictor Gallery, and Clio Art Fair. Her latest singles, released in 2024, are “double life,” "from infinity" and “Radically Pure (No other way),” available to stream wherever you listen.

Find my music on Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube, or anywhere you listen by searching for Alice Celeste.

Released on December 15, 2024: “double life”

Entering a new phase of my healing inspired this song. I’m able to be in the present moment more, the past is feeling more past and the future feels more real, more possible.

I wrote "double life" about this duality inside of me, a part that is still very much grappling with the pain of past traumas while there's also a newfound hope in my heart too.

I am here! I won’t hide what I’ve been holding inside!

Watch me sing from my soul …

From my Dec. 2024 show at Brooklyn Music Kitchen

Improvisation, vocal and piano outdoors

From my Dec. 3, 2023 performance at Rockwood Music Hall in New York City

From part one of my performance at Pictor Gallery on May 9, 2024. ✨

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.

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.)

This is my way of saying to myself and anyone who’ll listen: Music is a form of human expression. Everything is an option. Nothing is off limits. No part of you is off limits. You are not only enough in this state — this is the state of freedom, of honest expression.

Letting my voice be what it is and do what I want to do naturally is an opposite action to shame and an act of expression, to put the spotlight on my innermost, truest, most soulful self to stand up for what I really believe in.

I believe that change happens in the space after acceptance. Acceptance doesn’t mean approval. Acceptance means knowing the truth and not hiding from it.

I believe this world is at its best when we let ourselves and others be flawed and messy. And often, that’s just what we need to get the big things right.