Celestial Migrant (formerly known as Celestial Messenger) is the nom de musique of an Australian installation and performance digital artist, a sound designer and a composer. We have dedicated our long careers to the exploration of generative virtual reality as both instrument and spatial composition environment. In 2023, we embarked on releasing a series of four albums a year, two at a time, for seven years. Each album explores a specific aspect of the triangular relationship between digital spacetime, coded generative algorithms and ambient music theory. We are based on Kirrai Wurrung (Eastern Maar Nation) and Wurundjeri (Kulin Nation) land in Australia.
Please email celestial at this website.
Celestial Messenger is one translation of Sidereus Nuncius, which was Galileo Galilei's magnum opus.
In 2025, we changed our name to Celestial Migrant to express empathy and solidarity with all migrants, refugees, displaced people and First Peoples everywhere. Some members of Celestial Migrant are ourselves migrants and we are concerned at the recent rhetoric demonising migrants. No body is illegal. As migrants, we acknowledge the First Peoples of Australia and that sovereignty was never ceded.
Celestial Migrant mostly compose music by composing self-assembling real-time 3D virtual environments. These environments are both the compositional framework and the instrument for each piece. To actually play the music, either we navigate the environment in real-time, or the environment just plays itself, or both, depending on the piece. In either case, the resulting music is equally reliant on 3-dimensional spatial positioning to provide dynamic information—volume, stereo position, pitch, etc—as it is on musical or sonic considerations. It has taken years of practice to get to this point, where the pieces are able to endlessly compose themselves yet remain within the musical and compositional character of the given piece so that they don't sound random, they always sound like they make sense within themselves, that they are making compositional choices that have value within the compositional parameters of the piece.
This is completely different from so-called 'Generative AI' like ChatGPT and Suno. Music has a very long and rich history of using generative techniques. It has been said that while generative music and art creates something large, even infinite, from a small set of carefully chosen variables, today's Generative AI creates something small from a massive set of data. Perhaps it would be better called Degenerative AI? We don't necessarily have anything against this kind of AI, but we don't use it in our compositions.
From a sound and music perspective, our pieces exist within the historical context of ambient, drone, contemporary classical, deep listening and generative composition, with special reference to Stars of the Lid, Suzanne Ciani, Eliane Radigue, Morton Feldman, Joe Jones, George E. Lewis and Warren Burt. The pieces always use samples and some custom form of granular synthesis as the basic sonic ingredient.
We really believe that music and the digital were discovered, not invented, by people. Maybe "uncovered" is a better word. We participate in the becoming of that uncovering every time we listen to or play music and every time we use a digital device. But we don't need a digital device to participate in the digital. Using the digital to uncover new music is participating in a new unfolding of the universe. We believe this is an expressive practice of Ornette Coleman's philosophy of harmolodics, and this fundamentally guides our compositional and performance practice.
Many of the albums on this website are best listened to via their 'infinite version', which are desktop apps that compose and play the pieces infinitely on the fly, in real time. The streamable or downloadable mp3 albums are usually captures of live performances of Celestial Messenger navigating the self-assembling environment from which the music emerges, although occasionally they are simply captures of the infinite version. If you have any questions about this, feel free to email celestial at this website
A microtone is an interval (i.e., a difference in pitch) smaller than, or different to, a semitone. Microtonal music uses notes different from the 12 notes found in conventional Western music (rock, pop, techno, jazz, classical etc). There are many systems of microtonal music, including most non-Western musical traditions as well as recent Western systems of microtonal (sometimes called xenharmonic) composition. In our case, we tend to favour a non-systematic approach, often using aleatorics (i.e., chance-based procedures) to choose pitch, like we do with many of the other elements of our compositions. However, our tuning and pitch systems are not always microtonal, we sometimes use a twelve-tone system too, though usually this will be in the so-called just intonation.