Danceteria is having a moment. On the recent Confessions II, Madonna memorializes her own origin story—sneaking cassette tapes of her debut single to the deejay over lines of cocaine—on a track named after the New York City nightclub where CBGB punks and post-disco clubgoers collided in the early eighties. English New Wavers Soft Cell also named their forthcoming album after Danceteria, inspired by their time recording in New York forty years ago. The club epitomizes a certain era of the city: an explosion of music, art, and hedonistic freedom in the pre-HIV crisis, post-Gay Liberation Movement era.
While Madonna and Soft Cell nostalgize Danceteria as a lost Eden—a place where you could bump shoulders with David Byrne, Debi Mazar, and Jean-Michel Basquiat on any given night—Nirosta Steel’s essential MY SKYSCRAPER is a messier and richer document of that same cultural moment. The album offers a panoramic view of the longing, the ecstasy, and the restlessness at the heart of New York City’s artistic heyday. But there’s no nostalgia to smooth away its rough edges: MY SKYSCRAPER is a lost artifact that somehow arrives exactly when it’s needed.
Nirosta Steel is the alias of Steven Hall, a Scottish-born musician who became a close friend and collaborator of experimental music auteur Arthur Russell after moving to New York. The pair worked together on Russell’s disco tracks, including the not-so-subtly dirty “Is It All Over My Face?” After Russell died, Hall began Arthur’s Landing, a tribute project dedicated to his late friend’s musical legacy.
MY SKYSCRAPER feels like it comes straight from the source—velvety disco leaking out of Paradise Garage, improvisational ramblings over punk guitar—because much of it does. The album is a collection of forty years’ worth of recordings remixed and reconstructed over time. Though Hall continued to record and reshape the MY SKYSCRAPER material for decades, its songs still feel lived-in and well-worn. Like Russell, Hall approaches music through a fluid, Buddhist-informed rejection of artistic finality. An entirely different version of “GO FOR THE NIGHT” appears on Nirosta Steel’s 2014 release, Cool Fire. MY SKYSCRAPER has two different mixes of “FIRST LOVE,” the minimalist “RUFFIAN MIX” and a pristine “DISCO MOONBEAM MIX.” The archival label ULYSSA calls the songs “works-forever-in-progress.”
Hall’s endless reworking makes the album feel anachronistic, slipping back and forth across time. Take “BOSS TRIX (BENNY’S SONG),” which Hall describes as an “ode to a former Taiwanese boyfriend whose profound intellect was only matched by his ability to shoot a load of come up over his own head”: the track assembles marble-smooth disco out of strings, horns, and dusty hisses. “It’s all-all-all-all-all coming down,” Hall sings, his harmonies echoing like a sample dug up from a seventies soul record. “BOSS TRIX”’s closest comparison is not a Studio 54-era band but The Avalanches or DJ Sabrina The Teenage DJ—artists who piece together dance music from samples into something simultaneously nostalgic and untethered from time.
MY SKYSCRAPER’s transitions across decades would be jarring if the music didn’t share the same connective tissue. “LOST IN MUSIC,” an analog disco track, is followed by a recording of Cantonese street musicians, which segues into the album’s most polished and modern song, “FIRST LOVE (DISCO MOONBEAM MIX).” The sophisti-pop gem “MY NAME IS NIGHT” precedes a twenty-two minute improvisational tour de force “FRESH FEELING” and “SPECIAL WEAKNESS,” recorded in the early eighties with Russell on drums. Across every era, Hall returns to horniness. “Human body, bring it on,” he taunts on the endlessly sexy “MY NAME IS NIGHT.”
For all the quote-unquote “finished” songs on MY SKYSCRAPER, there are just as many rough drafts or snapshots into Hall’s circuitous process. “Maybe I’ll do a take where I sing ‘YHEMA’ like a Mickey Mouse impersonator.” He chooses to include an a cappella version of “GREY BOY” here, though a “full” version and a Mandarin version also exist. Individually, some sketches are more compelling than others, but together they all give the record a feeling of spontaneity and humor: “A.D.I.D.A.S. / All day I dream about sex,” he sings on “LOST IN MUSIC”; “I’d like to party with all the toys in the pool / ‘Cuz I’m invincible when I’m wet,” he later brags on the smoky, fetish-y, “THAITANIUM.”
Given Steven Hall’s relationship with Arthur Russell—and MY SKYSCRAPER’s status as a time capsule of downtown New York’s cultural prime—it would be easy to reduce it to history. But the crux of this album isn’t that it feels old. It’s that it feels timeless. “It’s silly and funny to be a pop star at 69,” Hall said about himself in a recent interview, an irreverent perspective that encapsulates MY SKYSCRAPER’s appeal. The joy of dancing, sex, and music isn’t bound to an age or decade. Hall’s depictions of eroticism and escapism feel just as pertinent now as ever. This is all for fun, after all. MY SKYSCRAPER is Hall’s 100-story monument to a timeless feeling. [ULYSSA]
Andy Steiner is a writer and musician. When he’s not reviewing albums, you can find him collecting ‘80s Rush merchandise. Follow him on X.
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