Hull began writing criticism for The Village Voice in the mid 1970s under the mentorship of its music editor Robert Christgau, but left the field to pursue a career in software design and engineering during the 1980s and 1990s, which earned him the majority of his life's income.
While he says Christgau had "welcomed me to New York, and further extended my ears … by 1979 or so my desire to write rock crit was flagging, and everyday life was moving on", citing in part the limited workload afforded to him by the Voice.
"[5] Hull remained involved with the site as webmaster, a role which author and Oxford Brookes University music lecturer Dai Griffiths later applauded.
The site has hosted his past and contemporaneous writings as well as a catalog of primarily jazz-based records and reviews, which adopt the grading schema from Christgau's Consumer Guide: Albums of the '90s (2000).
In February of that year, Hull also began writing "Recycled Goods" – a "Consumer Guide"-style column on archival music releases and reissues – for the Chicago-based webzine Static Multimedia at the behest of its editor Michael Tatum.
[10] In a commentary of Hull's jazz album reviews, Patrick Jarenwattananon of NPR writes: His picks reflect a remarkably eclectic sensibility, where the mainstream players (Houston Person, Randy Sandke) swim freely among with the modern progressive cats (Kenny Garrett, Donny McCaslin) and the post-modern rearrangers (Rudresh Mahanthappa, Nik Bartsch, Mostly Other People Do the Killing).
Seeing as how jazz criticism has historically been dominated by people pushing agendas – e.g. the DownBeat writer who called John Coltrane "anti-jazz" in 1961 – it's nice to see a professional listener with tastes across the spectrum.