De Vrije Loop is the second instalment in Ultra Eczema’s ongoing remix LP series, a project that invites turntablists and beat‑scientists to treat the label’s catalogue as raw material rather than sacred text. The rules are simple and radical: the artist gets access to the entire Ultra Eczema archive and is free to rework, re‑sequence and “refurnish” sounds that were never intended to be used this way. The series took flight with a first volume by DJ Grazzhoppa, whose fractal re‑imagining of UE’s back catalogue convinced the label there was a whole other life to be found in its own history. Fired up by that result – and by memories of late‑’90s / early‑’00s “After Hours” mixtapes where hip hop, jazz, noise and library music bled into each other at 3 a.m. – Ultra Eczema began inviting more heads to step behind the decks.
Enter Mix Monster Menno, Belgian turntablist and long‑time accomplice in projects like Flowlife Bumz, DJ Grazzhoppa’s DJ Bigband and the genre‑dodging outfit STUFF. A fixture in the country’s scratch and experimental scenes, Menno has built a reputation on razor timing, deep crates and an instinct for making disparate sources speak the same language. Grazzhoppa calls him his favourite Belgian turntablist, and De Vrije Loop is Menno’s first solo outing – a chance to hear what happens when he gets an entire label’s worth of strange audio to chew on.
Rather than assembling a polite label sampler, Menno approaches the Ultra Eczema archive as a living organism. Noise blasts become drum hits; free‑jazz squeals are sliced into stuttering hooks; small vocal fragments, tape hiss, field recordings and feedback tones are scratched, looped and thrown into quick‑cut collages. The resulting LP plays like a nocturnal pirate broadcast from UE’s back room: dense but fluid, veering from head‑nod grooves to abstract lock‑grooves, from tongue‑in‑cheek punchlines to moments of unexpected depth where a single loop is left to run long enough to become hypnotic. You can hear the influence of those After Hours tapes – long blends, sudden left turns, no concern for genre boundaries – but filtered through the tactile language of hip hop turntablism and the label’s own love of the absurd.
What makes De Vrije Loop more than a technical showcase is Menno’s sense of narrative. Across the two sides, he builds a loose arc: opening sequences that feel like doors creaking open on the archive; mid‑section stretches where beats coalesce, fall apart and rebuild themselves from different shards; final passages where the density thins and individual voices from the catalogue flicker through like ghosts. For Ultra Eczema fans, part of the pleasure lies in half‑recognising sounds – a snare from one release, a howl from another – before they’re yanked out of context and forced into new alliances. For newcomers, the LP works simply as a wild, tightly paced mix, a crooked tour through decades of fringe audio guided by someone who clearly loves both the source material and the craft of cutting it up.
As with the series as a whole, De Vrije Loop is less about nostalgia than about proof of concept: that a label’s past can be reactivated as present tense, that supposedly “difficult” music can be swung, scratched and made to bounce without losing its teeth. It’s Ultra Eczema’s world, re‑imagined from the point of view of a single pair of hands on the turntables – a free run, as the title suggests, where nothing is off‑limits and everything is up for grabs.
