Steven Hall’s “MY SKYSCRAPER” Spans the 1980s to 2025

In the East 12th Street building everyone called the Poets' Building, Allen Ginsberg lived on the third floor and Arthur Russell at the very top. Moving between them was a young Scot named Steven Hall, who had come to America at fifteen and stayed. Ginsberg took him under his wing, and one day introduced him to the neighbour upstairs.

From 1980 until Russell’s death in 1992 they worked together. It started with two acoustic guitars, Hall adding harmonies he had learned in Scottish church choirs. His voice is on “A Little Lost” and “My Tiger, My Timing”. There was also a joint album that never appeared; the 2008 collection “Love Is Overtaking Me” was drawn largely from it.

The influence travelled both ways. Hall brought Russell funk — George Clinton, Rick James. They recorded live, in single takes, without a click track. “We were so locked in together,” Hall says of those years, adding that thinking about it still leaves him dizzy.

Hall did release music, but not along a neat album path. He spent decades moving among Hong Kong, Taiwan and Bangkok, working with the theatre company Zuni Icosahedron and musicians from Cantonese and Peking opera. Recordings surfaced at different times and in different forms. The new LP therefore speaks more than one language and sits awkwardly in any single genre rack.

“MY SKYSCRAPER” came out on 29 June via ULYSSA. The double album gathers material recorded from the early 1980s through to 2025, sometimes giving the same song twice — a folk reading and a disco mix. The label calls it queer love songs and nightlife hallucinations.

Hall calls his method deep play: learning and performing happen together, while the border between rehearsal, concert and recording becomes thin. MY SKYSCRAPER finally places that method in one sequence. This was not an album hidden in a drawer. It was an archive scattered across a long life, now made into a double LP.