Opek prefers the cozy retirement life over the hectic leasing lifestyle. The beatproducer, drummer and rapper was born in the Ruhr area in 1990. Not on coal and not on gold, but somewhere where there was a computer and a big brother who explained to him around 2004 how ‘Fruity Loops’ works and what a snare is. And then there was hip hop, this thing that can suddenly fill every spare minute.

After years of drunken freestyles in the park and nights of producing on Windows 98 computers, he moved on (via excursions into guitar music) to jazz. This wondrous music brought Opek to the Netherlands in 2011, where he devoted himself to the art of jazz drumming for 4 years. After that he landed in Dortmund with empty pockets. Eventhough he was filled with doubt, he kept firing up the machines, even the MPC had a bigger purpose than a doorstop or ashtray holder.

Expeditions then took Opek to almost every smoky backstage in Germany and Switzerland, especially as a drummer and producer in the trio ‘Schlakks, Opek & Razzmatazz’. He now shares an office space with ‘Cerm MC’ aka. ‘Cmern’. This is how the joint project ‘Cmern & Opsay’ came into being, where even a serious word about bumpy beats is allowed to fall.

The greyness of the city is and remains the inspiration and drive for Opek to create even more cozy sounds. And so he continues to create hits that could be played in a museum in 400 years, provided that the USB sticks will last. Read more on Last.fm. User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License; additional terms may apply.