Ofer Bymel was born in 1984 in Jerusalem. He began on piano at eight at the Rubin Conservatory in Haifa and switched to drums at fourteen, later studying composition at the Academy of Music and Dance Jerusalem, where he graduated in 2008. While still a student he helped run a workshop-based music school in Haifa with the guitarist Ronen Kasperski (2005-2008), organised concerts and workshops at Haifa's Pyramida Center for Contemporary Art (2006-2010), and founded Tel Aviv Meetings, a monthly gathering for improvised music that continued for years afterward. His first recorded group was Tanaka, a Haifa free-improvisation quartet with saxophonist and clarinetist Adi Snir and guitarists Michel Mayer and Roni Brenner; its one release, Lithp, came out on the Israeli label Kadima Collective on January 6, 2008.

The record that put him in front of an international free-improvisation audience was yclept, a septet led by no one player, recorded on March 12, 2008 at HaTeiva in Tel Aviv-Jaffa and released the following year by the American label Balance Point Acoustics. It paired the Haifa contingent (Snir, Mayer, Brenner) with the German trumpeter Birgit Ulher, saxophonist Ariel Shibolet, and the American bassist and laptop player Damon Smith, who had been touring through Israel. That session opened a route to Europe: in April and May 2010 Bymel spent about ten days recording and performing in Berlin and Hamburg. On April 24, 2010 he taped a sextet session at the Exploratorium in Berlin with violist Ernesto Rodrigues, violinist Gerhard Uebele, cellist Nathalie Hörhold-Ponneau, violist Andrea Sanz Vela and guitarist Thorsten Bloedhorn, issued five years later as Licht (Creative Sources, 2015). The next day, April 25, he recorded a quartet with alto saxophonist and contrabass clarinetist Chris Heenan, Rodrigues again on viola, and bassist Alexander Frangenheim at Studioboerne45 in Berlin-Weissensee, released as Berlin (Creative Sources, 2013). That same week he also worked with the Hamburg sound artist Gregory Büttner: a studio session on April 23 at Gastatelier Fleetinsel and a live set on May 1 at the Blurred Edges Festival became the duo record Ripsnorter (Observatoire, 2012). He returned to Berlin in May 2011 to record a second quartet with Shibolet, violist Nori Jacoby and Frangenheim, released as Skulking In The Big House (Creative Sources, 2014), its cover built around a photograph of Sigalit Landau's fishing-net sculpture suspended in the Dead Sea.

At home, Bymel's main working group through the first half of the 2010s was EFT (Electro Free Trio), with guitarist Ido Bukelman and electronics player Daniel Davidovsky, all three credited jointly as composers. Its self-titled debut was recorded live at the Muzik Live Room in Tel Aviv on July 29, 2010 and issued by OutNow Recordings in 2011; the trio's second album, Spatial Awareness, was recorded live at Levontin 7 in October 2013 and released in 2014. Reviewing it for the Free Jazz Collective, Eyal Hareuveni described the group's music as slow-burning and abstract, built from white noise, concrete sound and subtle rhythmic rustling rather than a fixed pulse. He also drummed on Neurim (2014), a one-off session by the ambient project Farthest South, in which the poet and former soldier Ron Dahan read his own book of the same name over a live improvised soundtrack.

Bymel's association with the saxophonist Albert Beger dates from the same Tel Aviv free-jazz circle. He plays drums, album-wide, on The Gate (NoBusiness Records NBLP 126), a quartet with Beger on tenor saxophone and shakuhachi, pianist Milton Michaeli and bassist Shay Hazan, recorded May 31 and June 1, 2017 at Alt Studio in Afula and released in 2019 as a limited edition of 300 LPs with all six pieces composed by Beger. He also appears on Good Morning Universe (NoBusiness NBEP 4), a 10-inch EP recorded at Levontin 7 in Tel Aviv on February 17, 2017. That record is not a Beger album: Discogs bills it to Hazan alone, and all four pieces are his compositions. Beger is nonetheless part of its six-piece personnel, on tenor saxophone alongside a second tenor player, Eyal Netzer, while Bymel shares the drum chair with a second drummer, Haim E. Peskoff, and Nadav Masel plays a five-stringed custom cello called the Hamsa. It was issued in an edition of 300 in 2018.

From the late 2010s Bymel also worked outside jazz. With the songwriter and producer Yair Yona he formed Water Knives, an electronic duo on which he plays drums and co-produces; it released three self-issued digital albums, Contents Hidden and Follow Me To The Über Mandarin (both 2018) and Kloud (2019). He plays drums on three releases by the Tel Aviv rock trio ÖSTRA TORN (Redeemer, 2017; a split 12-inch with the Czech band Decultivate, 2019; Providence, 2020), and keyboards, drums and backing vocals on Come On Over (2021), an EP by the pop duo Midnight Noise with singer-guitarist Asaf Leizerovitz for the production-music platform Artlist. In 2026 he co-wrote Saturn's Rings Hotel & Spa, a concept album on the Israeli label Ma Ze Music credited to Tomer Baruch and Study With Midnight Noise, issued on vinyl in an edition of 200.

Bymel moves between two distinct vocabularies depending on the room he is in. On his Creative Sources dates in Berlin, several of which credit him with "percussion" rather than "drums," he plays in the extended-technique, largely ametric idiom associated with Ernesto Rodrigues's circle of European improvisers, working texture and colour rather than time. On the Tel Aviv sessions, including the Beger quartet and EFT, he reverts to a kit-based, pulse-aware drummer's role, and on his rock and production-music side projects (ÖSTRA TORN, Water Knives, Midnight Noise) he plays a conventional backbeat entirely outside the free-jazz idiom. That range, plus his years organising Tel Aviv Meetings and running workshops at Haifa's Pyramida Center, made him a connective figure in the Israeli free scene as much as a stylist in his own right, and it is what let a Haifa-trained drummer end up on European Creative Sources dates within two years of his first international recording.