Letter from Mongolia 20: Woven Sonic Fabric

This article continues our series exploring different ways of working with sound across creative and cultural contexts.

“ХИЙМЭЛ ОЮУН” (khii-mel o-yun) — or “XO” for short — is the Mongolian term for AI. For CPinMongolia.com we designed this XO logo to identify articles about research and creative practices that explore how imaginative minds are engaging with AI not as a replacement, but as a co-creator in their artistic expression.

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TESSUTU belongs to the newer wave of AI-assisted music channels on YouTube, or at least to be substantially built around AI-generated music and AI-style visual production, though its exact production process is not fully transparent. The channel began posting on YouTube in March 2026. The name seems to echo the Italian tessuto, “fabric” or “textile,” though the altered spelling makes it look more like a brand name than standard Italian. If intentional, the name suits the channel’s layered ambient/neoclassical style: music as a kind of woven sonic fabric.

In relation to the XO / хиймэл оюун strand of my work on CPinMongolia.com, TESSUTU offers an interesting outside comparison: not Mongolian, and not grounded in Mongolian cultural memory, but still part of the same wider moment in which AI is being used to generate atmosphere, voice, image, and affect.

Where the Mongolian AI-assisted examples I discuss are often compelling because they reactivate recognisable cultural worlds — song, language, kinship, landscape, and shared memory — TESSUTU seems to work more through mood, texture, and a polished neo-musical surface. Placed beside the Mongolian AI music videos, it helps clarify what is distinctive about the latter: not simply that they use AI, but that AI becomes a medium through which older cultural feeling can be heard, seen, and re-circulated.

In TESSUTU’s own language, the music offers “overwhelming stillness,” “transparent melodies,” and a sanctuary set apart from the noise of the world. Its imagery is elemental but abstract: rock, water, crevice, stillness, spaciousness. This creates a kind of polished interior refuge — music for concentration, and possibly for the laying-down of agitation or just sitting with difficult feelings. A very contemporary mode of solace, wouldn’t you say?

The Mongolian AI-assisted examples, however, move differently. They, too, may offer atmosphere, emotional recognition, or shelter, but the inward reflection they invite is less sealed off. It opens toward remembered voices, ancestral presences, landscape, shared language, and song. A viewer or listener is not only invited inward, but also back into relation: with mother, grandmother, homeland, tenger, community, and memory.

In this sense, certain Mongolian AI-assisted videos are not only mood objects. They become cultural objects — small digital sites where older forms of song, memory, and cultural expression may continue to circulate.

This is why the comparison is useful. TESSUTU shows how AI-assisted music can produce a refined aesthetic space: beautiful, solitary, emotionally absorbent. The Mongolian videos show how similar tools can also carry cultural weight. Their significance lies not only in AI novelty, or even in musical pleasure, but in the way familiar songs and images are re-voiced through new media. They suggest that AI (XO / хиймэл оюун) can be more than a technology of imitation; it can also become a means of return, re-hearing, and cultural re-presence.

Music made with AI tools can now do at least two quite different things. It can create an intimate atmosphere for one listener — music for focus or rest. It can also revoice songs that already carry language, memory, place, and inherited emotion. TESSUTU belongs mostly to the first kind: jazz-tinted neoclassical sound without words, shaped as a polished refuge from “noise,” whatever form of noise the listener is trying to set down — mental, emotional, digital or ambient.

The Mongolian AI-assisted examples, however, belong more strongly to the second: they work with songs already embedded in kinship, landscape, longing, blessing, and cultural memory. Words matter here, but not by themselves. Voice, melody, refrain, image, and recognition all help carry the song’s older life into a new form.

The contrast, then, is not simply between human and artificial music, but between different ways music can hold feeling — as private atmosphere, or as a new medium through which inherited songs and voices can be carried forward in new forms.

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NOTES

Solitude with Company

Here’s a question for you: As you were reading through the notes above, were you also listening to the music? We know people skim-read. If so, did it provide a companionable, unobtrusive background, or did it begin to draw attention away from the written words?

As for me, I researched and wrote this article while listening to TESSUTU’s Music for Deep Solitude, Exhibition No. 04, across three sessions. Its length — over an hour each time — gave my own research and writing a sense of continuity over time. It settled my focus, and its steady presence became a quiet reference point to which I could return, and from which the ideas, contrasts, and shape of this short essay arose.

So yes, this music did support focus for me — after all, it was also the subject of the article right? However, I question the channel’s auteur claim to offer “music for deep solitude.” To my mind, music is already a companion; even when unobtrusive, it changes the room.

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IN THIS SERIES

Letter from Mongolia 20: Woven Sonic Fabric

Letter from Mongolia 19: Udgan Tenger

Letter from Mongolia 14: Chandmani Erdene

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CP in Mongolia

Catherine Pleteshner, Independent Scholar and Musician

Letter from Mongolia 20: Woven Sonic Fabric