Nirosta Steel

The day after he turned 69, Steven Hall—at that moment, an Uber driver in Champaign, Ill.—finally found his audience. The label Ulyssa, long interested in excavating underheard archives, had sorted through hours of tapes Hall had stockpiled over the years under the name Nirosta Steel, stitching together its a cappella wonders and madcap dance tracks and acoustic Buddhist meditations into an 83-minute sprawl called MY SKYSCRAPER. The plaudits came fast, from Pitchfork dubbing it “an archival triumph and one of the year’s most thrilling new releases” to Paste describing it as “a 100-story monument to a timeless feeling.” Half a century earlier, Hall had moved to Delaware from Scotland, soon finding his way to New York, where he became immersed in the radically productive arts scene of Lower Manhattan. His mentor, Larry Fagin, introduced him to Allen Ginsberg, and he soon met Arthur Russell. “Afterwards I thought, this is my teacher,” he once said. “We were together all the time.”

Russell plays drums on a few tracks from MY SKYSCRAPER, and he and Russell wrote the pop fantasy “GO FOR THE NIGHT” together. But this delightful hodgepodge largely pushes past those historic associations, showcasing Steel as a boundless artist constantly in dialogue with evolving notions of what a song could be, of when it was finished. One version of “FIRST LOVE,” for instance, would have been at home on an Arthur Magazine freak-folk compilation, though it’s followed by a disco rendition that suggests minimal techno intersecting with the Talking Heads, as harmonica slides beneath its springy beat. Steel sings in Mandarin over chiming acoustic guitars, sighs seductively through granular electronics, and finds an ecstatic falsetto to sing about the jungles of Borneo over a delightfully damaged dance track. Nirosta Steel’s music is open and unguarded, a straight-to-tape outpouring of feeling and whim; a few months before turning 70, Hall comes to Big Ears 2027, stepping out of these old tapes and into the present.