My Skyscraper

My Skyscraper represents 40 years or so of works, re-works and works-forever-in-progress of one Steven Hall, aka Nirosta Steel – son of Scotland; step-son of the United States of America; adopted Daddy of Taiwan; Five-Star General in the Buddhist Army; legendary horndog stickman (we have pics!); friend, neighbour, collaborator and co-conspirator of Arthur Russell; and one of the most jawdroppingly sincere songwriting voices you’ll hear in this wretched modern era. Sure, that’s a metric fuck-ton of descriptors for a single person. But it’s sorta impossible to capture the full scope of this human being named Steven Hall. My Skyscraper doesn’t really even scratch at the surface of his output. But it’s always a rare and specific constellation of ideas and motifs: queer love songs – night life, giddy desire and odes to lovers of yesterday. There’s the anti-vibrato ethos he shared with Russell always present in the vocal stretches and horn performances. Sexy AF window-buffet disco. Cloudfolk earlobe-lick confessionals. Post-rave sauna-wave. We culled ‘My Skyscraper’ from a few hours-worth of longform mixes Hall sent to us last year. Right away, we noted he also shares with Russell a forever-sculpting approach to songcraft. A folk version of a song here; clubbed out disco version of that same one over there. An absolutely maniacal organisational process that had us triple-checking our metadata.