About Tisser Tissu Editions
There is a history of taking literary works as a weaving of many textual threads, a tisser tissu.* A text is viewed as a more or less structured collection of words, ideas, and impressions that can be unraveled by the critical reader—thread by thread—as they apply their experience and learning to understand the meaning the text has for them. That reader then adds their own personal and contextual threads back into a re-weaving of the textual tissu. Thus the text breathes and grows.
A piece of literature, thus, lives in a pure form only in the mind of its author. Every reader adds a layer of personal experience to the global understanding of the text. It is the same with music. Each time we listen, we are creating a new memory-map, weaving our own history and predilections within the sound to form a version of the music we hear that lives with us and changes as we learn more, feel more, and hear more; breathing and growing each time we undertake a new listening.
Tisser Tissu Editions is, at its core, an attempt to weave a similar fabric in experimental music. Each release of this sub label of Pleasure of the Text Records will be accompanied with information and context intended to help unspool and reconstruct the meaning of the music in the same way the reader unravels and reweaves a text. In some cases, these accompanying features will clarify: composers and performers talking directly about their work. In others they will only give a vague contextualization or will exist to purposely frustrate understanding. All of these elements are intended to goad the audience into reflection and personal study, with the best possible result being a return to the work to tisser new and individual threads into the tissu.
TTE001 features three studies for future work by Nate Wooley. It is a celebration of process over result and, besides hopefully causing some sort of joy in its audience, is intended to inspire all to work, try, do, and share.
*The word text derives from the Latin textus, which means a tissue, and is also related to texere which means to weave. On its way to modern usage, textus/texere passed through a phase of Old French where their tissue and weaving elements were translated into tissu and tisser respectively. The phrase tisser tissu, then, has a connotation of weaving words into a fabric.