Chaps: Introduce yourself, crews, affiliations and what you have done.

Omid: Omid, a producer from Los Angeles. I began making beats in 1992, started doing the Goodlife open mic in 1993, that's where I met most of the emcees I work with today. I am in a production team with Nobody called "Bomb Zombies".

Why did you change your name from OD to Omid? Was it to escape the shadow of Beneath the Surface?

I just decided to go by my real name, "OD" seems to have a negative connotation. I didn't want to escape the shadow of Beneath the Surface, I was actually concerned that fans of that album might not recognize my name when I changed it, so I always try to put the "producer of BTS" near my name on press releases.

Was it hard to make music after the insanely successful Beneath the Surface?

It was hard to make instrumental music after BTS, since making a track for one of your favorite emcees is much more fun than having to make up a track that can stand on it's own and not need an emcee to tell a story, so it took a while to get my beats more layered and to learn how to create more changes in the music.

If I was to say Beneath the Surface was your life's work what would you say? (Please be nice, haha.)

That's a compliment. I think I was lucky to document a very fertile scene that I loved and that was for the most part untapped at the time. I meet people all the time that tell me they were introduced to underground hip hop through