The 40-year excavation of Nirosta Steel

Steven Hall has spent years chasing the sound of the day Allen Ginsberg introduced him to a neighbor in the Poets’ Building at 437 E 12th Street in the East Village. Before the studio days of fiddling with microphone techniques and creating the illusion of intimacy through a voice put to tape, Arthur Russell invited Hall into his apartment to forge a musical collaboration—a friendship that would last until Russell’s death in 1992, and a mission to properly capture the magical quality of a soft voice amid Hall’s still-living vision of a mutant disco orchestra. It’s a body clinging to yours in depths of the club, the thud of the bass intruding on the hushed exchange. It remains a difficult balance to strike in the science of recorded sound.

“I was literally in his bedroom,” the now 69-year-old Hall remembers, “and here’s this person with this quiet, engaging voice singing to me. Some of my stuff is more removed, more abstract, but for him it was like a diary: a journal of what he was doing and what he was feeling. My idea [with recording now] is that you’re also in my bedroom, and I’m saying, ‘Listen, here! I’ve just written this song.’” Then again, it’s difficult to mimic that voice—singular and without affect, in part due to a strict “no vibrato” rule Russell and Hall shared for vocals—let alone its earnest habit of sending you on a three-minute waltz through the whispering gallery, leaning against you to spill its guts.

Arthur Russell’s voice, for Hall, is the thing. He no longer lives in New York, having recently shipped off with his husband to Champaign, Illinois, to live in “a house on the edge of a corn belt” with nicer people and more dead space to sing intimately. One thing he misses about the city is more frequent opportunities to perform live—which he did often, for a time, with Arthur’s Landing, a group of Russell’s friends and past collaborators who came together to rework and revive renditions of the late cult songwriter’s back catalog. Though personality clashes seemed to gradually drive the players away from the project, he says now that Arthur’s voice, too, was enough to drive more devotional members of the audience away with them: “Part of the resistance to what we were doing, or the indifference, was that people are so attached to Arthur’s voice, they just immediately have this visceral connection to it.” Some beloved things can’t be replicated. Sometimes, an excavation of things hidden is the only way forward.

While speaking to Steven Hall, you get the sense that he’s been bursting at the seams to have his own creative history unearthed, and that the release of MY SKYSCRAPER—a compilation of his own material, written and recorded over the span of 40 years—under his Nirosta Steel solo alias might mark the moment he finally breaks such ground. It’s endearing, the ease with which each wild piece of a life spills out of him, throwing vivid details at me with the ease of an afterthought: his time participating in singing competitions with his siblings as a child in Scotland, studying William Carlos Williams’ poetry under Ginsberg, the extensive time he spent living and working across Asia (which led to several of his songs being recorded in Thai and Mandarin), his most recent live show sharing a bill with Gia Margaret in Chicago, names of collaborators and past partners showered with tangential, overwhelming praise. You’re listening to a font of experience and memory and song pouring out of a body at capacity in terms of containing it all any longer. “I think of myself primarily as a survivor,” he says at one point, between mentions of his Arthur’s Landing bandmates and enumerations of their talents, “because, based on my lifestyle, I shouldn’t be here.”

The thing about all of that history is, yes, of course it matters. Even after my long chat with Mr. Hall has concluded with promises to ship me vinyl from his label and to email alternate versions of MY SKYSCRAPER tracks to hold me over in the meantime, I found myself scouring the transcript of our conversation to piece together a lost history of a certain New York artistic underground—of an East Village that now only exists in small, strange pockets of buildings across the neighborhood. And yet, the magical thing (and maybe a side effect of its decades-long gestation) about MY SKYSCRAPER is that its history and context are immaterial to its effect on the right recipient. It exists out of time, suspended at least three feet above your head. 

Sure, those familiar with Russell’s work will hear a few hallmarks in common: dance and folk music hemmed up in the same bed as sonic siblings, a willingness to embrace both the avant-garde and pop tradition in a single track. Still, for all that many people currently singing its praises in a certain corner of the internet know, Nirosta Steel free-fell out of the sticky summer sky to bestow the album of the year upon us, push experimental pop towards a spacy and lo-fi vision of its future, and let all notions of time freeze over. 

The miracle out of time surely struck the likes of Chanel Beads’ Shane Lavers, who was the first to tip the Indiana-based label ULYSSA off to the 2014 Nirosta Steel album Cool Fire. Eric Deines and John Williamson, the label’s co-founders, reached out to Hall about the record, which a friend had uploaded to Bandcamp, and asked whether Hall had any other unreleased Nirosta Steel material he could hear. “I said, ‘Oh yes, that would be the understatement of the millennium,’ so I put together some mixes of songs for him to listen to,” Hall laughs. “[Deines] really kind of got me, which is how this whole thing unfolded organically. He just, from the get-go, understood where I was coming from and made some really bold choices, because I sent him stuff I thought were good pop songs, but I also sent a couple of things that were left-field in terms of the production and the subject matter. He was totally open to everything, and [the mixes] spanned a whole bunch of years. I think he picked some of my best stuff.”

“The interesting part about working with Eric was he said, ‘I don’t want your Arthur songs, I want your songs,’ and I was saying, ‘But my Arthur songs, they’re really good!’ So he ended up only using one song [Arthur and I] wrote together, ‘GO FOR THE NIGHT.’” Russell also appears on drums to drive the durational, acoustic chaos of “FRESH FEELING” and “SPECIAL WEAKNESS,” both recorded nearly forty years ago on two-track tape in a one-shot analog session, both semi-manifestations of the pair’s concept of “Buddhist pop” in their build to transcendence. 

On the other end of the timeline lies two versions of “FIRST LOVE,” recorded more recently as both a disco track and its more bare-bones “RUFFIAN MIX” for a friend’s forthcoming documentary about The Saint, a long-gone East Village nightlife staple. Even while fusing different iterations of Hall’s voice and writing like replaceable, mixed-and-matched doll parts, digesting the record in a single sitting feels like watching an ever-morphing showreel of an unending night out—where touch feeds the beat and the day will never be seen again. By Hall’s own admission, he tends to write in the abstract, but the body remains tangible in the worn booth in the club corner, even while the music chooses a stranger path or seems set on ascension. The details in which he grounds the work aren’t quite diaristic, but feel real, if not strictly true. You’re unraveled by the falsetto in “YHEMA,” dizzy in dancefloor love with the groove of “BOSS TRIX (BENNY’S SONG),” woozy in the slinking sensuality of “MY NAME IS NIGHT.” You’re hearing ages of longing and years of life compressed into ninety minutes of tape. The midnight odyssey is engrossing enough that you don’t even miss the daylight.

“The problem,” Hall says, referring to his own recording process, notably when producing and playing solo, as he did several times across the record’s runtime, “is where to finish and how far to go. I’m very obsessive. I’ll just keep laying down a whole bunch of tracks. The people I know who mix, they’re like alchemists. To me, it’s almost like trying to catch a ghost. Sometimes it will happen, but I have no idea how it happened. I have to be smart enough to catch something that’s good while it’s happening.” Despite being able to work his way around nearly any instrument, save the drums, Hall feels he feeds on the “nervous energy” of the “wacky, genius guys and girls” he’s rounded up to collaborate with over his years of playing, noting that Russell first expressed interest in working with him “because he liked my guitar playing, which was very percussive, and also very syncopated and funky.”

Perhaps unsurprisingly, there’s immense tenderness in the way Hall speaks about his late friend, though it feels notable that, despite my own pledge to myself that I would avoid bringing Russell up first, Hall is consistently the one steering our conversation back to him—something I try to dig into gently as he speaks. “The word I used yesterday in talking about him was that he was so realized,” Hall says, still sitting firmly in his awe. “As a musician, he had incredible technique. I mean, he would play Bach for me on cello for fun, because I was just crazy about Bach. He had that training, and had the same [discipline] in his religious practice, which I wasn’t so serious about. I was interested in ideas, but not so much the hard work. He was doing the hard work, and then applying that to his music. He was already there, but I was on my way. It was like knowing Duke Ellington or Mozart, but also being a composer, and then being like, ‘Here’s my song!’” He laughs, mimicking his own nervousness as he presents his material to his peer.

“There’s a double thing of living in his shadow, because he really is a genius,” he pauses for a slight but aching correction, “and was a genius, and then also trying to live in a spotlight as well, because that sort of illuminates me in a certain way.” If Russell emerged fully realized, I wonder aloud, how long does it take someone in his orbit to fully come into his own as a songwriter on a similar level? Or, do most artists ever truly reach that state of satisfaction with their own ability? Is it just an ongoing pursuit of greatness within yourself? 

“I was asked yesterday what my favorite thing about myself was,” he begins, after warning me that his answer will come in two parts, “and I said my voice, because I still sound really young. The thing Eric first liked about Cool Fire was my voice, the gentleness in my voice, which is engaging. So, I was always confident in that. In terms of my confidence in my songwriting, that’s where being Arthur really helped, because he liked my songwriting. He finished a couple of my songs that I wasn’t sure about. I played him this song ‘Lost in Thought,’ thinking it was boring, and he was like, ‘No, no! I’ll finish it for you, I like it.’ When I was working with Arthur and the other people in that same group, it was a shared confidence that came from permission and trust—the grace that comes out of that.”

Despite his own proximity to what he deemed genius, Hall regards the warm reception to his own, ever-in-flux work on MY SKYSCRAPER as “a surprise to all of us—to me, and also to the guys at the record label—because we weren’t really expecting it. I had my doubts, because it’s a double album. I have my own label, Buddhist Army, and putting out a double album is just not feasible in terms of the market, but they were just passionate about it and wanted to do it. I’m usually more mysterious in terms of how I present myself, but [Deines] wanted to tell a whole story with the record. It’s a wide range of stuff, because I don’t restrict myself in terms of style, and then there’s also this story attached to it. I feel like kind of like Rip Van Winkle, coming out of a cave. I did these songs a long time ago, and suddenly, they’re being noticed.” 

Does he feel exposed, then, coming out from under a long and closely-studied shadow to whose memory he’s dedicated so much time commemorating and maintaining? “It’s nice for it to be happening at this point in my life, because the glamorous aspect of it doesn’t really interest me as much as it would when I was younger. Money doesn’t really interest me, because I have enough money to buy food and I have a place to live, and also I’m very fortunate to have a good partner who is supporting me and helping me as well.” If anything, the attention seems to have reinvigorated Hall’s focus on the magic threaded through each of the songs, eager not only to pass these spillover stories onto those devoted, finally turning towards him with widened eyes, but an excitement for the process of musicmaking and the motivation to create—as if offering a textbook how-to for someone who shares his passion to follow the same half-century’s path. 

When I ask about the chance that he’ll eventually perform MY SKYSCRAPER songs live (it is later confirmed that shows are in the works), he pulls out a new Teenage Engineering sampler, walking me through the latest additions to his toolkit. “In performance, you have more practical considerations, like, ‘Is this mic working?’ or ‘Am I going to fall off the stage?’ or whatever,” he explains, “but in the studio, where things work as controlled chaos, that kind of energy becomes interesting. I think that’s something that I still sort of yearn for. I always think about the term ‘deep play,’ which comes from anthropology. The idea is that anthropologists observe baby birds falling and, at the same time, learning to fly. It’s the idea of survival. You’re learning and having fun at the same time. You’re achieving the intensity or the sensuality of gospel music without the religion.” 

However, a different type of survival must take precedence in a live setting, as it surely will with the wide range over which these songs aim to stretch: “Sometimes, to myself, I say the Buddhist expression, ‘When you walk, just walk.’ I often have to tell myself, particularly in the middle of performance, ‘Just sing. Don’t do anything else,’ or if it’s playing guitar, ‘Just play the guitar.’”

And so, when Hall asks me to name my favorite song on the record, I just speak. My instinctual answer is “GREY BOY,” which appears in an a cappella version that Hall initially sent to Deines as a joke. The day prior to our conversation, I rode the subway and listened intently to the threadbare mix, which pushes Hall’s breathing and the patient ticking of a clock into the center of the track as instrumental backing is wiped to barely a ghost of a melody, letting all incidental sound wash over me and granting that voice permission to hold me as my riding companion. 

Once I’ve chosen it as my favorite solely for this reason, Hall pulls out a guitar and treats me to an impromptu performance of the song so I can see the shapes his hands make as he plays the chords. The following day, he emails me the full-band version of the song featuring trumpet by longtime collaborator Peter Zummo, but I hesitate to open the attachment, as I’m dumbstruck by the intimate swirl of the voice by which Deines, too, found himself bewitched.

“That was written in Hong Kong,” Hall says, after placing his guitar back on its stand, post-performance. “I would see these school boys on the buses who were starting to turn grey because they were under so much stress. I was teaching English in Hong Kong at the time. They never even had time to watch TV. They spent all that time studying. It’s the culture there—they were so worried. It’s not about a particular person; it’s just about a fantasy. When Eric not only picked that song, but picked that strange version of it, and it made me appreciate it in a different way, because I hadn’t really listened to those harmonies. I had only seen them as being in the background.” I point out that it all comes back to his voice—his school-prize-winning secret weapon, his favorite thing about himself. 

I restrain myself from asking him to provide a similar breakdown for each song in the tracklist—each bending itself to hold years of life and boyfriends and cities to call home—though I sense we would both be game to explain and absorb, respectively. I draw my own conclusions about the echoing spareness of “JOVI SONG” and foggy guitar workouts on “LOST IN MUSIC,” inventing their secret histories outside of traceable time. We have a hard out on this call, but nothing but hours to kill in MY SKYSCRAPER’s eternal night perched at a bar corner, guided by a tender voice stacked in the silence, making the darkness its own.

Elise Soutar is a New York-born-and-based music and culture writer.

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