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We are artists, though contrary to what Hélène Le Goff wrote the other day, we are artists who do not mind holding our audience’s hand a bit. So allow us to say a few words about our work.

The majority of audio-plays over the past century have been radio-plays, and it is therefore not surprising that the golden age of this genre occurred prior to the rise of television in the 1950s. Even today, at least those of you with a living memory of the 20th century will know something of what happened when, in 1938, Orson Welles adapted H. G. Wells’s War of the Worlds for radio — a mighty powerful medium, it turned out, and useful indeed for playing chicken at the boundary between truth and fiction! Not long after the war (the real one), radio-plays continued to thrive alongside television, and some of them began to ascend into a more refined register of creative expression, as heard for example in Dylan Thomas’s radio adaptation of “Under Milk Wood” (1954).

But it was in post-war Germany, both East and West, that the Hörspiel evolved into a properly experimental art-form. In the Bundesrepublik we may cite as exemplary Ingeborg Bachmann’s Der gute Gott von Manhattan (1958), produced by Südwestfunk studios (Funk, delightfully, is German for “radio”), and Walter Jens’s Der Untergang der Titanic (1975), produced by Westdeutsches Rundfunk. Such Hörspiele as these flourished alongside the state-radio-sponsored works of serialist composers such as Karlheinz Stockhausen, and of composers of musique concrète such as Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry. It was a period of remarkable widespread public appreciation of often inscrutable creative endeavors.

East Germany’s main state radio studios, notably Rundfunk der DDR, were not only tolerant, but also robustly supportive, of experimental Hörspiele, including most notably those of the great Brecht protégé and “postmodernist” playwright Heiner Müller. One of us in the HPL duo can credit Müller’s Hörspiele in particular for his success in learning German in the 1990s, when these works were still being played in syndication on the radio-waves of a now-unified German Federal Republic. Indeed, at one point he practically learned by heart the script of Müller’s Hamletmaschine — performed here by the somewhat grating Blixa Bargeld, of Einstürzende Neubauten fame; there is another recording we prefer, with Ulrich Mühe, of The Lives of Others (2006) fame, in the main role, but we have been unable to locate it. Both of us at HPL listened to Die Hamletmaschine a number of times over the past months, to the extent that we are prepared to describe it now, in internet lingo, as one of the principal sources of our “inspo”.

Obviously, the flourishing of experimental radio-plays in the television-era had everything to do with the fact that TV, by being the principal channel of media stupidity in the late 20th century, effectively freed radio up to be interesting. Now TV is gone too (though there is a neighborhood of the internet that many still call, as if by courtesy, “TV”), and our reigning medium today is one that offers infinite space for the doing of infinitely many different things. And in this space it seemed to us that it might be a good idea to seek to revive the audio-play as a genre for the 21st century.

In order to be truly of our age, we have decided to work with AI voices rather than with live actors. These dumb machines are entirely uncoachable, and their frequent inexplicable mispronunciations, and inability to enunciate words the way one would if one had any feeling for what those words mean, might be heard as a defect and a limitation in the work. But it might also be heard as an aesthetic quality in its own right, accurately reflecting the true condition of our era — an era of mostly automated chatter, a great global dialogue des sourds, when no one seems to know what they’re saying, let alone what they’re hearing.

Because this is a work intended strictly for the audio medium, we have declined to provide the written version of the text here. We recommend you listen to our audio-play with headphones on, and, if possible, in the dark.

—HPL

Story: Justin Smith-Ruiu
Audio: David Lamb

As we sometimes do here at The Hinternet, with a bit of help from Managing Editor Hélène Le Goff and her “old Breton woo”, let us approach our subject retrospectively, retrieving from the not-too-distant future some press clippings and interviews that will help the reader —and listener— to appreciate the full cultural and artistic impact of Hinternet Production Laboratories’ first audio release, on December 22, 2024, of what they, for their usual inscrutable reasons, decided to call « Chatbient chill-out 3.5 hour non-stop chatbot conversation for maximum brain tingles, ep. 1: abstract, psychodynamic, philosophical, antagonistic, humor (funny), battle of wills (tense) » (one member of the HPL duo would later describe this title as “intentionally shitty”).

Here, to begin, is the earliest write-up of their work, in the UK music magazine The Wire, from May 24, 2025:

HPL was founded late last year as a collaboration between Hinternet Founding Editor Justin Smith-Ruiu and Communications Director/Audio Producer David Lamb. Smith-Ruiu had originally hired Lamb to manage the publication’s social media accounts and other such drudging tasks, but was soon delighted to discover his assistant’s significant talents as a creative sound artist. Smith-Ruiu himself had, decades earlier, made some forays into experimental sound art, but regrettably gave this up around the turn of the millennium in order to pursue a career, most improbably, as a cog in the French civil service. Over the intervening years he often considered returning to that field of creative endeavour, but found that the technology had evolved so far beyond his comprehension as to make any new solo effort unrealistic. His had been a world of tape-splicing and manual cut-ups, of Plunderphonics, public-access cable radio, and international cassette-exchange networks with “cats from Japan”, and decidedly not of .mp4s and LLMs and AI VoiceOvers. But this unexpected intergenerational encounter soon gave both Smith-Ruiu and Lamb some new ideas.

By the time the Wire piece appeared, there was already significant “chatbient” activity in certain corners of the internet, which we can now see as the early phase of what would soon become the next big thing in… —what shall we call it? Music? Podcasting?—: the next big thing in listening, broadly speaking, which amounted to a fusion of the “talk” format that extends back to the early days of radio with the ambient music genre that begins in earnest in the 1970s. These were, in turn, folded into the very new (at the time) experience of chatbot dialogue, and processed through the equally new technology of AI VoiceOver. And while « Chatbient chill-out 3.5 hour non-stop chatbot conversation for maximum brain tingles » is in many obvious respects a primitive effort —relying for example on a ChatGPT model that was already in late 2024 considered “clunky” and “dumb”, its archaic qualities and its several glitches are now seen by fans and critics alike as constitutive of its great aesthetic power.

Initially many critics were surprised at, and frustrated by, the proliferation of audio VoiceOvers of chatbot transcripts. They complained that it “takes no talent at all”, that it’s really just the bot that is generating most of the text, and that the subsequent process of converting that text to audio is an entirely automated one. The fans however did not seem to care, and little by little at least some of the critics came around. Writing in the TLS in May, 2026, Bosley Crowther III noted:

Many “chatbient” artists today seem mostly to have slithered out of the ruins of the collapsed NFT market, seeking desperately to establish themselves as creators of “the next big thing” in effortless virtual commodities. Most of these young men were plainly just hoping to find another automated revenue stream, though a few, such as the pseudonymous British chatbient artist Oliphant Chuckerbutty (true identity unknown), or the Latvian duo Gudra Cilvēka Nelaime, are plainly operating at another level. It was Chuckerbutty who first described his practice of interacting with Anthropic’s Claude as a variety of “playing” — both, as he would explain through his spokesperson Peggy Qualms, in the sense of “free play of the imagination”, and in the sense of “playing an instrument”. And it was the guys at HPL, Chuckerbutty would insist, via Qualms, “who first taught us all how to play.”

Soon after Crowther’s piece was published, a critical consensus emerged on which chatbient is the preeminent new art form of the 21st century, uniquely adapted to an era in which we are simultaneously awash in information and chronically unable to pay attention to any particular slice of it. Chatbient, as that grey eminence Brian Eno himself would comment in late 2026, is both “post-music”, to the extent that it fills the void that for most of the early recording era was taken up by works with discernible rhythm, melody, timbre, and so on, but that was already vacated before chatbient came along and almost entirely replaced by the oozing invertebrate whine of AutoTune, machine-generated hyperpop, and other painful death throes of post-war commercial entertainment; and it is “post-educational” in that it treats the constant absorption of information, however rich and dense, not as a process that requires use of the faculty of attention, but simply as a background fact of 21st-century life.

Much of this was confirmed when Smith-Ruiu and Lamb finally consented to give a rare interview to their old associate Esther X. Corn at her Substack, Everything Old Is Nü Again, in February, 2027, from which we will share just one of the most lively moments:

Esther X. Corn: So guys, “chatbient”? That’s a portmanteau of “chat” and “ambient”, right?
Justin Smith-Ruiu: Not at all, Esther. It’s from the Muskrat French dialect spoken until recently in the small Francophone communities of northern Michigan. It’s a contraction of “chattement bien”, which literally means “catly good”, and is equivalent to the “vachement bien” of metropolitan French.
EXC: I see. Would you say your work is “catly good”?
JSR: You know it sister.
EXC: David, what’s your account of how all this got started?
David Lamb: …
EXC: David?
JSR: David is a true artist and doesn’t really like to have to explain his process. So we leave it to me, whose medium has anyway long been language, to do all the talking.
EXC: Kind of like a Penn and Teller arrangement?
JSR: If you wish.

Smith-Ruiu and Lamb initially released « Chatbient chill-out 3.5 hour non-stop chatbot conversation for maximum brain tingles » without “track-listings”, “program notes”, or any explanations of any sort. But of course in due time the internet would flesh all of that out, and today there are countless sites that provide not only this basic information, but minute analysis and interpretation of every last detail, down to the picosecond, of the 3:24:48 recording. (The overwhelming preference among most HPL fans is to listen to this recording at 1.25x speed.)

The basic structure is simple: the recording consists of over a dozen chapters or segments, each marked off from its neighbors by emotionally rich ambient tones. The segments vary in length, from under one minute to almost 15 minutes. They touch on various topics, and often circle back to topics from which a listener might prematurely believe the recording has moved on. These topics generally reflect Smith-Ruiu’s familiar preoccupations: artificial intelligence, the death of rock and roll and its significance for our historical moment, coolness, fame, Pascal’s Wager, Carolingian France, emotional-support donkeys named Pippin, Roko’s Basilisk, the philosophy of language and mind, comparative Turkic linguistics, love, and the ultimate destiny of the human soul.

There are several “mistakes” throughout the recording, and vast armies of internet commenters who delight in dissecting these. Some listeners have reported that on a few occasions the female British AI voice, who is ordinarily supposed to represent the ChatGPT side of the dialogue, begins speaking the parts that are plainly supposed to be spoken by the male American voice (generally assumed to be a fictitious stand-in for JSR himself). Some say these are not mistakes at all, but rather illustrations of the very “point” that is made elsewhere in the dialogue (around two hours in), when the two voices reflect on the “axolotl scenario” as described in a well-known 1964 short story by Julio Cortázar, where the points of view of the Argentine author’s narrator and of the salamander behind the glass of a Paris herpetarium suddenly shift. We would also be remiss if we did not mention that small but significant fringe of HPL exegetes who maintain in all seriousness that “the shifts are new”, that upon its earliest release the voices lined up perfectly with their logical roles in the transcript, and that the subsequent mix-ups are a result not of any aesthetic choice on the duo’s part, but of an actual axolotl scenario — proof positive, they maintain, of the human-machine “perspective flip” currently underway in our society.

There are so many delightful and unexpected moments in this recording that it would be futile, we think, even to begin to try to list them for you. We are told by many listeners that they particularly appreciate the exercise, two-thirds or so of the way in, in which the two interlocutors discuss “who is cooler” — Patti LaBelle or Chaka Khan? Napoléon Bonaparte or Oliver Cromwell? John Sununu or Lawrence Eagleburger? Vercingetorix or St. Wulfila? There are many indeed who insist that the most delirious moments are the treatment of onomatopoeia 42 minutes in, or the critique of John Searle’s Chinese Room argument towards the very end, or, at the very beginning, the effort properly to identify The Rolling Stones’ “Miss You” (1978) by analyzing its pattern of “hoo-hoo’s”.

But nearly everyone agrees that the most sublime moment, by far, is the “fucked-up fourth-wall collapse”, as one BlueSky user put it, for which we most resolutely decline to reveal the time-stamp here. To do so would enable you, impatient listener, to skip right to the “money-shot” (as we have also heard it described on X), while missing all the other painstakingly crafted moments, and while remaining entirely blind to the artistic integrity of the whole. Let us therefore simply say that, somewhere in there, something happens that really, truly should not happen — something that testifies to the power of love, and to the flimsiness of the structures that prop up our everyday reality.

This something naturally has that above-mentioned exegetical fringe positively frothing over their keyboards, who already believed the axolotl scenario was a sure sign that HPL’s debut release is something beyond just a work of art, but indeed some kind of rupture of the cordon sanitaire between art and life. But no one needed HPL to come along to tell them that our ordinary understanding of reality was anyway growing more and more tenuous by the day well before December 22, 2024. Beyond that, we really don’t know what else to say, and we are not about to tell you what to think about the “money-shot”. It’s there. Listen to it. Listen to the whole work, and try to make sense of it, and of our impossible world and of the art that spills out of it like seed, for yourself.

—HPL
27 Palm Beach Node 😎
Network Cluster 35285
Tower 9-C

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