NIROSTA STEEL - My Skyscraper

There's an image that keeps coming back obsessively as you listen to "My Skyscraper": that of a party that never ends, where the light keeps shifting, faces blur together, and time loses all linear meaning. Steven Hall, the musician hiding behind the moniker Nirosta Steel, has spent forty years chasing that feeling. And this album is its most complete and moving testimony.

Hall is no stranger to those familiar with the hidden folds of underground music. Scottish by birth, American by adoption, a citizen of the world by vocation, he moved through the second half of the twentieth century like an explorer of uncharted sonic territories. Studying with Allen Ginsberg, playing with Arthur Russell, living between Hong Kong, Taiwan and Bangkok, and singing in Mandarin and Thai allowed him to live more lives than a single biography could ever hold.
"My Skyscraper" is the fruit of that life. A double album gathering material recorded between the early Eighties and 2025, reassembled and reconceived as a single unified work. It's a record that defies every category: art-pop, sophisti-pop, mutant disco, hypnagogic pop, singer-songwriter fare. But more than any label, it's an attempt to capture the essence of what Hall calls "deep play" — the idea of learning through enjoyment.

The album opens with "English Party," a queer anthem to the joy of living. Hall's voice is strange, disarming, yet possessed of a sensuality that's entirely his own. There's a lascivious elegance to his singing, and an ability to sound dirty and refined at once. "Go For The Night" is another small gem, a track that glows with nocturnal light: muted strings, intertwining guitars, and that voice that seems to whisper directly to you. It's the moment when the collaboration with Russell shows through most clearly.
"Fresh Feeling" and "Special Weakness" are the two tracks that form the beating heart of the record. A journey that refuses to end, where Hall sings of overlapping loves, of feelings that find no name. Hall explores human vulnerability and the difficulty of loving in a world that gives no quarter.

The album is full of these delicate, oddball moments. It's music that dances on the border between the sublime and the ridiculously catchy, between emotional depth and the most carefree fun. A work made of sonic snapshots, a journey through genres crossed with the ease of someone who has stopped worrying about categorization.
"My Skyscraper" is built with the awareness that Hall has reached the age of seventy to piece his life together, a skyscraper of sounds and feelings rising above the noise of the present.

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02/08/2026