Omid Walizadeh

Omid Walizadeh, also known as Omid or OD, is a hip hop producer based in Long Beach, California. He has produced tracks for the likes of Freestyle Fellowship, Busdriver, 2Mex, Subtitle, and Awol One.

Omid Walizadeh graduated from Loyola Marymount University with a bachelor's degree in recording arts. He has produced tracks since 1992.[10]

Inspired by the underground hip hop movement at the Good Life Cafe in the early 1990s, he released a collaborative album, Beneath the Surface, in 1998. It featured over 30 rappers, mainly from Los Angeles.[11][12]

His solo debut album, Distant Drummer, was released on Beneath the Surface in 2002.[13] It was inspired by Dan Simmons' novel Hyperion, the music of Sun Ra, among other things.[10]

In 2003, he released the album, Monolith, on Mush Records.[14] It featured contributions from the likes of Abstract Rude, 2Mex,[15] Buck 65,[16] Luckyiam, Aceyalone, Murs, and Slug.[17] The title comes from Arthur C. Clarke's novel 2010: Odyssey Two.[18]

In 2007, he released the instrumental album, Afterwords 3, on Alpha Pup Records.[19]

He is the music supervisor of This Is the Life, a documentary film which chronicles the Good Life Cafe.[20][21]

In 2013, he returned with Modern Persian Speech Sounds.

In a 2003 interview, Omid Walizadeh talked about his music making process: "90% of my music is sample based, but I tweek and rearrange and change the samples to my bidding. Just taking a note here and a drum hit there and creating a whole different arrangement."[18]

He uses an Ensoniq ASR-10, Yamaha CS1x, and Pro Tools.[10]