Scottish producer Jordan Alexander—better known as Mall Grab—spent much of 2020 stretching out. The Eternal project found him testing ambient textures, broken beats and balearic drift, an ambitious sprawl that proved how far his sound could roam. His first release of 2021, Room Full of Rothko, snaps straight back to the essentials: five tracks on his own Looking For Trouble imprint built around the wonky, sample-dusted piano house that first made his name.
The title track sets the tone immediately. Room Full Of Rothko (Extended) opens on a grainy piano loop, ever-so-slightly detuned and swinging like something lifted from a dusty cassette, its imperfections proudly front and centre. Beneath it a four-to-the-floor kick locks in with a loose, breakbeat-adjacent drum groove, while a warm sub bass pads out the low end without ever crowding the melody. Named for the painter rather than any literal space, it conjures exactly what the title suggests—a room of colour, light and slow-moving emotion, the sort of record that sounds enormous in a small space at 4am.
Best of all is Nonstop Feeling, the most immediate thing here and the track destined to become the EP’s calling card. A soulful vocal sample is chopped and pitched into something close to ecstatic, soaring over the same lurching piano and a bassline that drops with real weight. It’s the hook that will carry the record into festival sets and warehouse closers alike. The two-part Ill works a deeper angle on the same palette—Ill, Pt. 1’s rhythm is more hesitant, its pads murkier, whilst Ill, Pt. 2 lets the drums breathe into a headier, more open groove—before the closing Room Full Of Rothko (Edit) trims the centrepiece to a tight three and a half minutes, proof that the idea works at both sizes.
There is nothing showy about Room Full of Rothko, and that’s very much the point. Where Eternal reached for the sky, this EP finds Mall Grab back in the basement, revelling in the small, sticky details that made him the figurehead of lo-fi house in the first place. A gloriously wonky reminder that his biggest strengths lie in the imperfect, and a confident opening statement for 2021.
