Hi, I’m Stan van den Baar, a Dutch soundguy most recognized for my work on films such as “Jackpot” (2025), “Het Ligt Aan Mij” (2024), “Ome Cor” (2022), “One More Shot” (2021).

I’m also the owner and operator of a boutique studio based in the heart of Rotterdam where I focus on creating bespoke audio-focused solutions for art and media.

Outside of work I’m just as boring as most and spend my time with loved ones, jamming on personal interests in- and outdoors. I enjoy silence for breakfast and casual gaming for fun.

To relax I field-record and make noises by and while playing various instruments. I love sharing the gift of cooking, provide the occasional workshop in sound (sometimes combining the two) and feed new minds old tricks.

Socializing and traveling have always gone hand-in-hand for me so I need to take a field trip somewhere every so often to meet new and familiar faces.

In my work I strive for clarity in story and emotion through a multi-layered and holistic process. I employ an impressionistic approach, while sometimes unorthodox for mainstream media, it is very suitable for experiential media and leaves the final say with the audience.
More details on that journey here.

I share my musical musings under various pseudonyms: Venesta, Apophis, The Tux, Not Made For Mono, Willem L’FO on platforms such as Spotify, Bandcamp, SoundCloud.

From a young age I became fascinated by music, sound effects, electronics, tape and vinyl. My mother was a professional ballet dancer until I came along and my father exploited a pub so there was music on all the time. I grew up in the hay-days of the Hi-Fi era during the transition from analogue to digital media and the boom of consumer electronics. Listening to the radio and having cassettes all around I naturally began making mixtapes and playing at making radio with friends. This grew out into webradio hosting, making free-parties and lots of hazy jam-sessions. Growing up in a household of violence and addiction throughout most of my childhood, I found my escape from this turmoil in technology and the arts. Re-enacting film scenes and sketches (on and off stage), learning the score and mimicking the sound effects like one of my childhood heroes: Michael Winslow.
Apart from developing a passion for regularly breaking the household VHS machine and then taking it apart for purely anatomical reasons, the ‘drums’ (aka Nan’s pots and pans <3), photo-cameras and portable tape-recorders became a big hit.

At the age of 13, nearing the end of my first year in high-school I made a friend and we started experimenting with computer-based musicking and quickly became fascinated with the endless possibilities of CoolEdit Pro. Mastering CD’s from your bedroom. MP3 just came out. p2p. Yarrrrr. I was already heavily into venturing out in cyberspace, so why not the high-seas? Well, that side-tracked into a some-what successful decade-long IT career.
Anyway, a year later I discovered the local all-vinyl record store in the town we moved to and from that point on my academic prospects quickly diminished as I rapidly became an avid crate digger and night-time techno DJ in the weekends. Yeah, no, I wasn’t really gearing up to do the whole conservatory thing.

After attending a talky-talk at the 10th anniversary of ADE and at the mixer afterwards throwing myself into a group of people, at least two of which I was heavily fan-girling over at the time (Dave Clarke and Ferry Corsten), and managed to make a positive impression I I was invited by one of the group to come visit the SAE Institute studios and nigh immediately fell in love with what I experienced the first time operating in one.

A couple of years later I moved to Rotterdam and started to pursue an active career in audio-engineering while holding down my IT job as a sysops. During this period I enjoyed short residencies at renowned recording studios, produced a couple of studio singles and EPs for artists, recorded my first soundtracks for short-films under the umbrella of Audiophile Sound and Music. In 2020 this split up and became Sonophile for publishing and Noordersound for production of sound and music.

Once upon a time during my maiden 5 minutes of fame on local TV, a man told me (I think he was in a panel for a 48Hour Film Festival) he believed all sound-designers to be (“gesjeesde muzikanten”) failed musicians. To not let the world go bereft of such great taste and discernment, over the years I’ve put my efforts into creating an immersive style of sonic funk curated by decades of failing successfully.

(if you don’t get the joke by now – that’s on you)

As a side-quest I’ve also dabbled at game-making and audio design mostly in Unreal Engine (3/4/5) by modding games, and game-breaking by QA-testing for several indie and AAA game developers over the years as passion projects.

Here’s a picture of me laughing. See, underneath that dry humor, sarcastic wit and RBF autistic death-stare I can be perfectly amiable. Beer helps too ngl.