Steven Hall, 69, a Scottish musician living in Illinois and driving for Uber, is suddenly earning critical acclaim for his double LP My Skyscraper, released last month under the name Nirosta Steel. The album compiles material recorded between 1984 and 2025, blending disco, folk, synth-pop, Chinese opera, and ecclesiastical a cappella. Pitchfork called it “an archival triumph and one of the year’s most thrilling new releases.”
From Uber Driver to Critical Acclaim
The album came about after a label head, impressed with Nirosta Steel’s 2014 album Cool Fire, asked Hall if he had more music. “He didn’t know what he was in for,” says Hall. The couple of dozen unreleased songs he shared spanned four decades of eclectic musicianship and revealed a globe-trotting life intersecting with experimental icons such as Arthur Russell and Allen Ginsberg. “I feel like Rip Van Winkle! Like I suddenly walked out of a cave and I’m blinking my eyes and there’s all this bright light shining on me,” says Hall. “Two weeks ago the label was maybe $2,000 in debt because we were going to do 200 copies. Now we have 1,000 orders and are looking to press 2,000.”
A Life of Collaboration with Arthur Russell
Born in the Glasgow suburb of Milngavie to a middle-class optician father and a “tough as nails” mother, Hall grew up performing in church choir and local theatre. After his father died, his mother placed a personal ad in the International Herald Tribune and the family relocated to the US, drawn by Hall’s fascination with American musicals and the Chrysler Building, built from a stainless alloy called Nirosta steel. Poets including Allen Ginsberg visited his high school, and Hall joined them on trips to New York City, eventually studying dance and poetry at Naropa University under Douglas Dunn and William S Burroughs. There he met Arthur Russell, and they formed a deep friendship and collaboration, playing backup for Ginsberg’s poetry sets. “His genius was totally organic and came from his Buddhist awakening,” Hall says of Russell. They co-wrote songs including Go for the Night, which appears on My Skyscraper, and Lost in Thought. Two of only three recordings of Russell playing drums are on the album—Fresh Feeling and Special Weakness—improvised one-takes saved from old tapes. “Once we got going, the idea was we don’t stop, and we don’t go back and do it again,” Hall recalls.
Global Inspirations and Future Plans
Hall spent substantial time in East Asia, scoring performances for an experimental theatre company in Hong Kong and recording location sound in Taiwan. The track Lost in Music includes audio from a Cantonese funeral procession, and Boss Trix (Benny’s Song) was inspired by a Taiwanese lover. With the album’s success, Hall plans live engagements including his first performance at New York’s former Pyramid Club since playing there with Russell. He hopes to write with new collaborators and do a covers album including Sade’s No Ordinary Love. “There was no plan or budget for promotion, it was just the music we wanted to put out,” he says. “Certain musicians just keep finding ways to approach it. There’s an authenticity in terms of the process, because everyone was just doing it because they wanted to. And that’s what my music is like, too.”
