OP! has joined the ranks of the respected cadre of tastemakers and bootyshakers in the New York underground scene. Homegrown in Brooklyn, his path began there, but along the way has taken him halfway around the globe, from the US to Africa, and back again.

Growing up in the golden age of hip-hop, OP! first caught the dj bug from listening to Kool DJ Red Alert and Marley Marl on the radio, and dj battles on Ralph McDaniels’ seminal pre-MTV Video Music Box (little did he know that he would soon be working in both radio and television himself). In high school, a friend of a friend, a dj at a local college, took him under his wing, and soon OP! was djing on that college’s radio station… while still in high school. He went on to become the Hip-Hop Music Director there, and a major musical force on the campus.

After college, honored with a Watson Foundation Fellowship to research hip-hop and radio in South Africa, an opportunity to work at the first, and newly formed, commercial youth-oriented radio station there arose, and soon OP! was on a (long) flight to Johannesburg. YFM 99.2 exploded onto the scene (the station has well over 3 million listeners now) with OP! (formerly know as Absolut) eventually working on three ongoing shows, including his own mixshow, one of the first hip-hop mixshows in South Africa. After two years, having become a well-known and respected hip-hop dj there, OP! came home to Brooklyn.

He spent the next years cutting his teeth in the industry at TVT, 88 Hip Hop, and then Sub Verse, where he played a central role in the then emerging solo career of MF Doom, overseeing the re-release of KMD‘s shelved sophomore album, Black Bastards, and Doom’s groundbreaking first solo effort, Operation Doomsday.

With his feet firmly planted in the industry, OP! turned his attention back to the turntables. This move has seen OP! spinning at such notable events as Rich Medina’s Connect the Dots Loft Party, the RMFRP event at WMC 2005 in Miami, the RMFRP event in NYC, the Black August Building Sessions, and the Escape 2 Brooklyn parties.

And on the live side, OP! has shared the stage with legends like The Roots, De La Soul, Poor Righteous Teachers, Executioners, and Hieroglyphics, and future legends from Alice Smith to Tortured Soul.