Nirosta Steel’s My Skyscraper Brings an Arthur Russell Collaboration Out of the Myth

Nirosta Steel’s My Skyscraper arrives carrying the weight of a record that was never supposed to surface. For years it belonged to a category of lost tapes whispered about in certain circles—the kind of artifact that generates its own mythology precisely because it remained unheard. Now that it’s here, the reality is stranger and more compelling than the legend.

Arthur Russell appears throughout, not as a distant footnote but as a core presence. The collaboration pulls open an alternate history of early-’80s experimental pop, one that existed alongside Russell’s better-known work but followed a sharper, more fractured logic. The songs don’t aim for the dancefloor or the cello suite; they twist pop forms into something airless, intimate, and slightly wrong in the best possible sense.

What makes My Skyscraper feel necessary isn’t nostalgia. It’s the way these recordings reject the tidy narratives that have calcified around Russell’s legacy. This isn’t a missing piece of the puzzle so much as evidence that the puzzle was never meant to be solved. Even now, the music sounds freer and less self-conscious than much of what passes for adventurous pop, a reminder that some of the most forward sounds were made in near-private, with no guarantee anyone would ever hear them.