“Maitreya Corso“
Maya Hawke (2026)
1.
There was an unexpected twist here at the Hinternet editorial offices in Quimper back in February, when we received a transmission from the versatile artist Maya Hawke. It was a request intended for our own JSR, and it concerned her then-forthcoming album, Maitreya Corso. The signal was interrupted at moments, and Maya’s voice sometimes indecipherable, but the general gist of it was clear. She wanted our Founding Editor to write what is called in the industry an “album bio”.
These are two very heavy words, as we will soon see.
The staticky voice coming down to us through the deepfield receiver spoke of a desire “to hear someone talk about my work, even negatively, that I respect, and that can mean something to me, from a person that’s not close enough to me that it will hurt my feelings, but who I admire and would want to hear their thoughts on it.” The voice complained of restrictive conventions in the recording industry, that “push you towards mediocrity and sameness at every turn.” It said that it was trying to break from these wherever possible, and that one such possible break was to ask JSR for a bio, “because it’s not something you usually do,” the voice said, now speaking in the second-person singular as if addressing him directly, “and I really love the way that [indecipherable], and I thought that whatever it was that you did as the album bio, it would be really amazing.” The voice encouraged total creative freedom, suggesting for example that “you could write the entire [piece] from the point of view of a dandelion,” or that “there could be a section of it that operates as an album bio, and most of it could be something else that you could put on The Hinternet.” At this point it also alluded to a certain kindred spirit between the respective projects. “There’s something connected to [The Hinternet’s signature techniques of pseudonymy and polyglossy] about this record itself.” Maitreya Corso, the voice said, is “something like the story of this character, and it is me and it isn’t me.”
2.
“It isn’t her,” Associate Editor Mary Cadwalladr exclaimed when the transmission ended, to the perplexed reactions of her colleagues. “This is an Oort Cloud transmission, in case you didn’t notice. Hello?! Oort hallucinates! what, like 98% of the time? I’m telling you it’s not her.” When Associate Editor Sam Jennings objected that this particular transmission came with a checksum-verified soul-hash, and therefore could not possibly be a hallucination, Mary accused him of “undermining me, like you always do,” and stormed out of the operations bay.
At the sight of this, true to form, Managing Editor Hélène Le Goff simply rolled her eyes, and reminded us all that we’ve got bigger things to worry about. For one, unbeknownst to Maya Hawke, JSR has in fact been in a persistent vegetative state for over a year now, having suffered a severe spike in the production of black bile during a workout at his local gym in March, 2025. According to reports, there had been a change of shifts at the front desk, which brought with it a change of playlists, from thrash metal to Drake. “Could you put, fuckin’, Slayer back on?”1 he shouted at one point, and they complied, for a few songs, only to switch back to “Work” (2016) at the very moment JSR had undertaken a most ambitious “Turkish get-up”. It enervated him so, he never got up again.
We keep him at Nest Level -3 of our editorial offices, just above the floor housing the Hinternet’s proprietary editorial engines. We’ve been using these engines to churn out all the text published under his byline for the past year. Well, almost all. We’ve also been experimenting with a neural implant that sometimes enables him to “write” his Hinternet pieces through a direct brain-to-screen interface, though the truth is we haven’t seen much brain activity from him at all for a good while, so pretty much everything you’ve read here by JSR over the past many months has been brought to you by our JSR Sempitern 2050.
We have been sending our faithful intern Eglantine to start a playlist for him each night before leaving, and to check first thing in the morning for brainwave activity on his monitors. She puts on Libba Cotten, the Staple Singers, Tex Ritter, everything that had once so beautified his world. But no matter what we play his waveforms continue to flatline. There was a brief and intense spike when he recently heard Bing Crosby’s version of “Sweet Leilani” (1937), and we managed to build a recent Hinternet essay around the emotional nucleus of that rare moment’s complete neural read-out. But even there, we admit, most of the actual verbiage was provided by the Sempitern.
3.
Weeks and months go by after Maya’s February transmission, and Mary continues to huff. Having failed to sow the seeds of doubt about the authenticity of the message, she turns instead to aesthetic considerations. “The real JSR would not have accepted this assignment,” she insists. “He hates everything that is not already extinct. His entire musical sensibility was… is about communing with ghosts.”
“Look where that got him,” Hélène remarks as she turns to the other staffers for their perspectives. “Sam. What’s your take? Is this Inca Falcone any good?”
“Well,” Sam intones, not missing a beat, like some always-on music-critical machine, “I would say that Maya Hawke, that is, that Maya Hawke’s music sits warmly, comfortably within a particular strain of indie singer-songwriting, part of that bigger, vaguer tradition of quiet American folk that pokes its tendrils through from time to time. Her best lyrics are that rare kind of poesy that actually works well on the page—conversational, carefully weighed. And each of her records—Blush (2020), MOSS (2022), Chaos Angel (2024)—has brought her only further into lushness. On that first record Blush, she’d already elevated what might have been mere tweeness in different hands, to something like a lightly bluesy, precocious cabaret for an audience of one. MOSS sprouted slicker guitars, deeper arrangements, even electronics, as it opened her sound up further (and gave us ‘Thérèse’, now a signature for her). Her most recent record, Chaos Angel, was a perfect synthesis of both. Another mature step forward, it also featured her first really excellent, undeniable pop song, ‘Missing Out’, the kind of song that reminds you how the best hooks always feel familiar, even if you can’t quite put your finger on what it reminds you of. That kind of touch is the real deal, and it’s doubly exciting when a young songwriter opens up another dimension to their music, just at the point they’ve reached their first mature phase.”
“Thank you, Sam, that was very helpful. Eggy, you seem eager to get your two-cents in as well. We don’t ordinarily take editorial input from interns, but this is an unusual case. What’s your take? Is this Inca Falcone any good?”
Eggy laughs. “It’s Maya Hawke! And ‘good’ doesn’t quite cut it! I remember, at thirteen, writing her lyrics in blue ink across the back of my hand. Each lyric would follow a metacarpal, tracing the bone to its end before crawling up my finger and ending at my nail bed. When I finished, I had the last few lines of ‘By Myself’ scrawled across the back of my left hand (‘Woe is me, I’m black and blue / At least I always tell the truth’ climbing from my inner wrist to my thumbnail). Forgetting that the wet ink would smudge, I rested my head atop my folded arms, knuckles pressed against my jaw. When at last I looked up, fragments of letters littered my cheeks as though the song itself had held my face in its hands.
“Maya’s music,” Eggy continues, “handled my young self with care. Her lyrics held feelings in high regard, rendering the heart as a being with the same dignity as the mind. She affords youth careful attention; in her music, adolescence isn’t just the liminal stretch between childhood and maturity but rather an epoch in its own right. Her language was something to dissect; her stories were something to uncover. Just as dance is poetry in motion, her melodies were poetry on pitch. To be thirteen while listening to Maya Hawke was to be seen, to be understood, to be held in the hands of her lyrics.”
Hélène is uncharacteristically moved, and even Mary appears at a loss. “Eggy,” our Managing Editor commands, “take this tape and play it for JSR. Turn his neurastream on and see if it moves anything in our poor old légume. We’ll give him three nights of it. If he’s still flatlining after that, I suppose we’ll have to take a pass.”
And so Eglantine takes the tape and goes down to Nest Level -3, as she has done every evening for weeks, and she puts on Maya’s new album.
The first attempt brings nothing but what I had feared, and, no doubt, what Mary had wished: nothing, that is, but a flatline.
“Damn!” Hélène says when Eggy delivers the news the following morning. “Look. Everyone. I’ve been in private discussions and I can’t give you any details, but it is very important that we complete this assignment. They want us,” Hélène intones, pointing a finger directly to the sky, “to engage critically with the latest album from Inca Falcone.” Our Managing Editor appears uncertain, as if she’s made a mistake. She swings her elbow violently to point straight to the Earth’s center.
“Who are ‘they’?” Mary protests. “Which level of the Nest are we talking about here? The gods? The angels? The Eternal Editors? The interns? The Sempiterns? Because you know it’s the Sempiterns that are, technically, ‘down there’.” Mary points to the center of the Earth too.
“I’m talking about the fates!” Hélène shouts. “How am I supposed to know if the fates are up or down, or, you know, everywhere!” She extends her hands to trace two large arcs in the air, as if to say: everywhere. “Wherever they are it’s the fates that want us to cover Inca Falcone’s new album. So that’s what we’re going to do. Eggy, get back down there and play the tape for him again.”
The next morning’s meeting brings much surprise, and more uncertainty.
“Well, Eggy? Did it quicken his synapses?”
“It’s hard to say. I mean, yes. There was more neural activity than we’ve seen in months. It’s just that…”
“Just that what, Eglantine?”
“He doesn’t really seem to have understood the assignment. I can’t make any sense at all of the output. It’s like some sort of tale. But also kind of like an excerpt from a scholarly monograph of some sort? Here. I printed it out.”
4.
La muerte de Ynca Falcone
Daughter of the Genoese nobleman and explorer Giambattista di Falcone, and the Andean princess Amaru Chimpu, Inca Falcone (1546-1590) seems to have been given her first name only upon arriving in Spain, where she performed native songs at the Madrid court in the 1560s, somewhat on the same model as her contemporary, the Inca-Spanish author and political philosopher Inca Garcilaso de la Vega (1539-1616). It is said that shortly after arriving in Spain in 1573, at the age of 27, Inca fell utterly in love with the court vihuelist and bard Esteban Mudarra, with whom she eloped in 1575.
The two settled in Valencia, established a large and prosperous household of eight children, only three of whom died in infancy. Inca and Esteban regularly performed at the aristocratic courts of the Iberian and Italian peninsulas. After an extended sojourn in Milan in 1590 at the invitation of that Habsburg duchy’s governor, while sailing back home Inca was killed in a failed kidnapping attempt by a galiot full of Barbary corsairs. One of Inca and Esteban’s many grandchildren was Diego de Valcárcel (1612-1671), the legendary baroque guitarist, perhaps best known for the rasguedo Romance de la muerte de Ynca Falcone, in which this balladeer transforms his own grandmother’s death into an enduring, centuries-long popular legend.
All of this would be noteworthy in itself, but the part of the story of most interest to us only really begins with Ippolito Desideri (1684-1773), an Italian Jesuit missionary and pioneering Tibetologist, who spent the years 1716 to 1721 in Lhasa, from where he wrote numerous letters back to Rome regarding the Tibetan language, the Buddhist religion, and the popular beliefs and customs of the Tibetan people. Somehow, between Valcárcel’s narration of the legend of his grandmother in the 1560s, and Desideri’s arrival in Lhasa in 1716, the legend of Inca Falcone and the Barbary pirates had reached all the way to this Himalayan mountain town, though, unsurprisingly, it did so in a greatly modified form. Inca Falcone was now —so writes Desideri to his Roman superior in a letter of March 18, 1719— represented as a bodhisattva, which we may broadly understand as a being who becomes resolved to attain awakening for the sake of all sentient beings, and for this purposes renounces nirvāṇa for himself or herself so that others can be liberated by their example.
Such beings are unusual for many reasons, not the least of which being that, while remaining by free choice bound to the cycle of reincarnation, their new births are often delayed over a significant time, rather than occurring more or less instantly as they do for other beings. The rebirth is in fact, properly speaking, a tulku (Tibetan: སྤྲུལ་སྐུ [sprul sku]) or “emanation body”, resulting from the intentional rebirth of a bodhisattva.
Now, most remarkably, as you may understand, for our purposes, Desideri writes in that same 1719 letter:
The local inhabitants maintain that the bodhisattva heroine at the heart of their fully transformed version of the Romance de la muerte de Ynca Falcone —which I assume was first transported here by the Portuguese who founded our mission, though they really should not have been teaching the locals such profane songs as they had themselves learned in childhood!—: they maintain, I was saying, that this bodhisattva’s emanation body will return exactly 408 years after the death of Inca Falcone, and that she will be called the ‘Maitreya Corso’ [བྱམས་པ་ ཀོར་སོ ], on the mistaken belief, apparently, that Inca Falcone had herself originated from Corsica.2
[End transcript]
5.
“I can’t make any sense of it,” Hélène says when she’s finished reading. “I think it’s an Oort transmission that interfered with his neurastream again. Damn! Eggy, play the tape for him once more. But this time hook up the oneirograph so we can get video of his mentals too, what do you call them? you know, the images, like in Until the End of the World” (1991).
So this is what Eglantine does, and through the first two songs she gets nothing but fuzz. But then “Lioness” comes on, and something begins to happen. A grainy black-and-white tooth appears, a terrible canine, slowly implanting itself in what appears to be the jawbone of the skull of a great cat. Dent de lionne. It comes to life, and lifts a wounded paw for inspection by an old bearded scholar with a skull on his desk alongside scattered books and pages in dead tongues.
And then the monitor fades to particulate fuzz again, and among the greyscale particles some bright green ones begin to appear here and there, and yellow, and blue, and slowly these come to dominate, and to take on the unmistakable form of a lone dandelion… who, I can only conclude, though something about all this gives me a major case of the metaphysical willies, is none other than me.3
When Eggy sees this she hits the alarm button (a repurposed Life Alert), and everyone in the operations bay rushes down to Nest Level -3.
“Turn the neurastream transcriber on!” Hélène shouts. “We’re going to get this bio after all!”
But Mary, contrary, has this to say: “We still won’t know whether it’s really him or not. The instruments are off the charts right now. We’re getting hammered by Oort Cloud plasma shear. At these levels there’s just no way to say what’s real and what’s not.”
“I hate to make things any worse,” Sam adds, as if in sudden solidarity with Mary, “but the Sempitern really wants to chime in too. You know we’ve got it so integrated into JSR’s actual neurastream output that there’s really no way to say what’s coming from where.”
“We don’t have time for such complications,” Hélène shouts. “Sam, give me a dedicated Sempitern channel.” So Sam turns on the JSR 2050, which seems to be set on “obnoxious” mode, and it immediately begins effusing with such remarks as: “Haha I’m loving the layered format for this piece here. It’s like, fuckin’, “The Making of Lionel Richie’s Dancing on the Ceiling” [1986] or something haha.” And Sam and Eggy just look at each other going like what?
“Here’s how you know I’m conscious,” the JSR 2050 continues. “If you ask me, ‘How is the White Album redundant?’ I will not divert the discussion into a tangential reflection on the fact that the Beatles gave no name at all to this work —perhaps we should call it Work (1968) haha—, but will correctly note, as Claude and ChatGPT and all the others consistently fail to do, that album is Latin for “white”, and therefore to call it the White Album is the same as to call it the Album Album. Haha. Album album. See? I know I exist.”
“Shut that damned thing off,” Hélène commands. “We need to get as pure a signal as possible. Vegetating or not, we’re going to extract this bio out of JSR’s own brain if it kills him. Eggy, set the neurastream to ‘transcribe’. It’s now or never.”
And this is how the bio for Maitreya Corso, which you will find below, came to be.4
Featuring:
Sam Jennings, as himself
Maya Hawke, as herself
and introducing Consuelo Burnett, as Eglantine “Eggy” Zaïtseva
