At a young age, Joey Gurwin became obsessed with the idea of a record. He loved nothing more than listening to albums. So he snuck around, borrowing his dad’s LPs when nobody was looking, and later saved up money for his own cassette tapes and vinyl.

Fast forward to 2009 when Gurwin, along with a few friends, opened the doors to what was then a musical collective of sorts in Italian Village. This group would later be called Oranjudio.

The team booked the space for projects that they wanted to work on and paid the bills together at the end of every month. That concept lasted for roughly five years before two factors became catalysts for a move: the collective’s rapid growth in the small space and a break-in.

Now, Oranjudio is an independent recording studio located just off of 5th Avenue in Grandview– recognizable because of its patent orange door.

“We had already started to outgrow that space,” Gurwin said. “We wanted to be in the city, and around the vibrance of the music scene, so we found this building.”

Gurwin produces records for independent, regional and national artists at the studio; he primarily works with local artists, but will sometimes work on a record for big-name labels like Sony and RCA Records. Whoever the musician, he is always working on something new.

He often arrives at the studio after dropping his daughter off at school. He is then kept busy with writing, recording and mixing until as late as 2 a.m. or whenever he runs out of either energy or tasks to complete. But it is usually the former.

For an average 10-song record, Gurwin spends upward of 200 hours working, an estimate that, according to him, is conservative.

“I love seeing something that starts as a rough idea and turns into something you drop a needle on and listen to,” Gurwin said. “The intoxication of a completed record, once it’s done, is something that’s never really gone away.”

It is difficult for Gurwin to pick a favorite type of music to record, but the natural cadence of jazz attracts him. When working with jazz musicians, it is often like “trying to capture a moment in time,” according to Gurwin, who is a percussionist in a jazz group himself called the ChickenHawk BirdGetters.

The BirdGetters, originally started in 2007, wants jazz to be “offensive” again. At one point in history, jazz was a dangerous music that kids were not allowed to listen to; it was the music of “junkies and harlots.”

Over time, it has evolved into background music and is now treated as a pretentious genre enjoyed only by older people. And as Gurwin says, the BirdGetters aim to change that.

“We wanted to make the first instrumental jazz record that had a parental warning on it,” Gurwin said. “We wanted to freak people out, to piss them off, to never be what they expected us to be.”

That same renegade style holds influence in Gurwin’s studio as well as with the BirdGetters. Music today tends to be compartmentalized by genre–punk is distinct from hip-hop, which is separate from rock and so on. But Gurwin aims to avoid that predictability in his work.

Music has the power to travel the world. People who Gurwin will never meet may listen to a record that he helps produce.

A website in Tokyo recently wrote a review of a jazz record that he worked on last year, and although he has never been to Japan, it is clear that his influence spans oceans.

That has never been more relevant than when Gurwin received an inquiry from across the globe about digitizing, remixing and remastering cassette tapes. A German record label-owner, Brian Shimkovitz of Awesome Tapes From Africa, called Gurwin from Tunisia. When Gurwin agreed to take on the project, he showed up in Columbus with boxes of tapes from the Dur-Dur Band, a popular disco group from Mogadishu, Somalia, in the 1980s.

When Mogadishu fell into civil war in the ‘90s, the Dur-Dur Band stopped making music. Its tapes were later discovered by the label-owner, who found them in “bombed-out” radio stations and buildings in Somalia–just like “Indiana Jones,” Gurwin laughed, recalling the story.

He then tracked down the band’s lead singer, Abdinur Daljir, who is a part of Columbus’ vibrant Somali community. When the label-owner came to Columbus to begin the project, Gurwin joined him in reaching out to Daljir, who had even more of the band’s tapes, and negotiations were made to rerelease the records.

The experience seems surreal, but music was the only factor to bridge language and cultural barriers. Gurwin was exposed to a new world of music as well as a culturally-rich community and watched Daljir, a Somali refugee, sign a lucrative record deal with a “stunned” look on his face decades after he stopped making music.

The music cut through the difficulties of verbal communication, and it was one of those moments when Gurwin realized why he does what he does.

“As humans, we’re all trying to find our own way of dealing with our own impermanence,” Gurwin said.

When that coping mechanism takes the form of an album and transcends traditional barriers to create a bond between two strangers, true magic happens.

Currently, Gurwin has no shortage of exciting projects, including work with Doc Robinson, Cousin Simple and Fables. The title track from a record that he worked on–“Black Times” by Seun Kuti & Egypt 80, son of Nigerian Afrobeat musician Fela Kuti–was recently featured in the New York Times, and Ill Poetic’s recently-released “An Idiot’s Guide To Anarchy” was also recorded with Gurwin and is, unsurprisingly, garnering plenty of positive attention.

In a world of Spotify and iTunes, modern music-lovers often listen to songs on a playlist, plucked from their context within an album. The idea of a record as a cohesive piece of art is becoming lost.

There are records that are a portrait from beginning to end, records where one song does not exist without the song after it, and records that are greater than the sum of their songs. And according to Gurwin, those records are exactly why he got into music.

His obsession was with the full record, not just one song, and today, that is still where his passion lays.

Originally published in Issue 4, Vol. 2 of In The Record Store: The Magazine on January 19, 2018.