How an obscure tape label discovered Nirosta Steel’s MY SKYSCRAPER

A month ago, very few people knew the name Nirosta Steel. But on June 29, when the 69-year-old singer, producer, and guitarist released his sprawling, omnivorous new album MY SKYSCRAPER, something happened.

Steel, born Steven Hall, was a mentee of beat poet Allen Ginsberg and a collaborator of Arthur Russell, and has spent much of his life traveling the globe. MY SKYSCRAPER’s 17 songs trace Steel’s journey over the past five decades, spanning songs he recorded from the 1980s to 2025. Bridging such disparate genres as dub, funk, disco, Balearic house, balladic pop, and Mandarin opera, to name a few, it offers snapshots of the New York Downtown scene of the ’70s and ’80s, and plenty of other scenes besides.

Steel has been making music for a half-century, but his work has received little attention before now. His 2014 debut LP COOL FIRE/酷兒歪歌, a live album recorded at a queer bookstore in Taiwan, went virtually unnoticed, as did its follow-up, 2017’s DRY ICE. He expected a similar reception for MY SKYSCRAPER, despite its more intentional layout and smoother feel. “We had no idea that this was something that people were listening for,” Steel tells The FADER on July 23.

Within days of its release, MY SKYSCRAPER vaulted Steel from relative obscurity to an unprecedented level of microcelebrity: minor stardom on “Gay Twitter,” a 9.0 from Pitchfork, and four near-instantly sold-out shows at Nightclub 101 in New York City. It’s also been a dramatic change in fortune for ULYSSA, the little-known label behind its release.

“Three weeks ago, ULYSSA had $15 in the bank, and it's different now,” says Eric Deines, who co-founded the label during COVID with fellow tape enthusiast John Williamson. “I’m scared to death right now.”

Deines and Williamson are calling in from Bloomington, Indiana and San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, two and a half weeks after the release of MY SKYSCRAPER. The duo had no clue Nirosta Steel’s newest record would sell better than anything else they’d released in the past half-decade: The two A/B singles they dropped led to just 14 pre-orders, and the PR email they sent around collected dust in the inboxes of music journalists around the world. They treated the album no differently than they had their past projects, all of which they’d sunk immeasurable amounts of energy into, even when they couldn’t afford to release them in physical form. “People weren’t even buying enough tapes to make it worth spending $450 on 100 cassettes,” Williamson says. Despite the precarity, the pair invested $1,000 to press 200 vinyl LPs the day before MY SKYSCRAPER dropped.

From the label's inception, the ULYSSA boys have committed themselves to promoting artists whose songs are generally unknown beyond their family and friends. Through boolean Spotify searches, Williamson has found thousands of albums that exist outside the algorithm. Many of the artists they’ve discovered have zero monthly listeners, often because their songs were uploaded to the DSPs, unbeknownst to them, in the 2000s, when the then-indie distributor CD Baby began to add much of its physical stock to streaming. “It's pure flotsam, neglected little islands,” Williamson says. “It felt like being the first person to show up at a flea market.”

Since September 2020, ULYSSA has released 42 albums on Bandcamp. These include a Duwap Kaine loosies tape and a collab album between eccentric pop auteur LUCY and untested Minnesota producer i.v. But much of their catalog is populated by collections of oddities — some exclusively bearing tracks with less than 1,000 plays — and exhibitions of singular artists excavated from the junkyard of forgotten media. There’s Mississippi Delta polymath and human skull collector David Michael Moore, Indiana glitch-funk-house grandma Inga McDaniels, 66-year-old Alabamian Christian-Jungian blogger-singer-producer John R. Brusseau, and many more unlikely stars in the making.

Deines became aware of Nirosta Steel through Chanel Beads’ Shane Levers, whom he was courting at the time in his role as Director of A&R at the Secretly Group. (One could be excused for thinking Deines might have wielded this position to gladhand MY SKYSCRAPER into the limelight, but consider the fact that very few of ULYSSA’s 41 previous releases broke even). When he heard COOL FIRE, he was instantly smitten. “I have a vivid memory of being at my in-laws’ lake house and looking out at the lake and listening to it, thinking, ‘I've never heard a live record like this in my lifetime,” he says. “I was like, ‘I am for him and he is for me.’” Deines initially tried to sell the Secretly team on signing Steel, but the timing wasn’t right. When he pitched Steel the idea of releasing a project with ULYSSA instead, Steel was game.

Steel’s leap from obscurity to critical stardom is an enigma from every angle. With no apparent industry backing, no astroturfed social media campaigns, and only one piece of pre-release press, MY SKYSCAPER emerged from the fog without warning. ULYSSA’s founding fathers chalk up the success of the album to a confluence of factors. They credit Gay Twitter, especially writer-at-large Harry Tafoya, for lighting the fuse; upon the album’s release, he took to social media to call its back cover, “the craziest reverse image ever seen on an album.” Featuring an artful photograph of all-male intercourse, the titillating image sparked a chain reaction of music heads across the globe. But it was more than that: Steel attributes his glow-up to a, “combination of good luck/good timing and good music,” as well as a “nostalgia for the freewheeling and free-loving ’80s, mostly from people who didn't live through that period—otherwise they would have to acknowledge the casualties of those thrilling and edgy encounters.”

Does critical approval translate to commercial success? “Not enough to quit your day job,” Williamson says, “but I'll tell you this: We’ve made more in the last two weeks than we've made in the five years we’ve been a label.” He and Deines plan to use this minor windfall to invest money, as well as time and effort, in the projects they believe in. “All we've ever wanted this to be is a self-propelling art engine,” he says. “We talk, half-jokingly, about ULYSSA Pictures. We talk about making art books. We've talked about all sorts of things. Basically, we want to get our hands on everything we think is cool.”

As for Steel, Deines claims he’s been acting like a diva since he became music media’s indie darling du jour. Steel doesn’t deny it. “My husband calls me a ‘slubrity’ — a combination of slut and celebrity,” he says. “He jokes (or maybe not joking) that my head might explode if it gets any bigger. Fortunately I have him to keep me in my place, and an opportunity to apply the lessons I learned as a student of [Buddhist master] Chogyam Trungpa about silent and expressed gratitude informed by the grace with which to know the difference, like when to shut the fuck up and just enjoy the ride!”