ES
ES (Elwin Staal) is a producer, multi-instrumentalist, and audiovisual artist based in Groningen, the Netherlands, whose work has grown out of the underground dance scene since the late 1980s. His music lives where studio production and live playing meet — shaped by rhythm, texture, and emotion rather than fixed structures.

He grew up surrounded by music. His father, Ede Staal, is one of the most influential cultural figures the province of Groningen has known — an artist whose songs captured the landscape, language, and emotional core of the region, and continue to resonate decades later. While Elwin’s work moves in a very different direction, it carries the same core: music driven by feeling and emotion.

His path began in the 1980s with piano and early home computers, where instruments and machines first came together. By the early 1990s, he was deeply embedded in the underground dance scene, performing live hardware-based sets and developing a personal musical language through improvisation and hands-on experimentation. As a multi-instrumentalist, he approaches music as a single process, where studio work and live playing become one. Across his output, jazz-rooted freedom and funk-driven movement sit alongside electronic textures, with each track finding its own mood — from rhythm-focused to spacious, atmospheric, and cosmic.

He studied Audio Visual Media at the Art Academy Minerva, but his real education happened elsewhere — in underground clubs, basements, rehearsal spaces, and on stage. Choosing freedom over formal structure, he eventually stepped away from the academy to fully follow that path.

From the late 1990s onward, these elements came together under the name Planet Beyond — a self-built world where sound and image evolve together. While he continued to perform live and occasionally DJ, his focus increasingly shifted toward VJ work and live visuals. At a time when the use of visuals was still uncommon in club culture, he was among the early artists creating live visuals for underground dance events, driven by feel and an instinctive understanding of the music. He performed extensively at parties and events across the Netherlands and worked as part of the VJ collective V-Gen X.

Across these years, he built a vast archive of music and visual material — decades of recordings, sketches, experiments, and unfinished ideas created without deadlines or expectations.

In 2021, he released IS EP on Chasing Sunsets Records, marking the moment he began releasing work under the name ES. Now, with Planet Beyond – Selected Cuts Volume 1, released in 2025 on Ruiger Records, that long-growing archive surfaces in a more complete form. The album draws directly from decades of material: raw, intuitive, and shaped by time rather than trend.
A Jazz-A-Delic, Soul-Sealed and Funk-Shielded Journey Into Sound...
- Timeless and Unmistakably ES -

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