Brown/Who do we think they are, 9. Martin Birch – Catalyst: The Pivotal Role of Deep Purple’s Sound Engineer on the Classic Mk2 Albums

The final chapter of Part Two by Jan-Peter Herbst is an appreciation of the pivotal role of Deep Purple Mk2’s sound engineer, Martin Birch in the recording of In Rock, Fireball, Machine Head and the ‘live’ Made in Japan. It examines how he encouraged and captured the loud and distorted, riff heavy, hard rock sound of the Mk2 Purple band in the studio and on stage. In this respect, Herbst seeks to situate Birch’s emergence, as an innovative sound engineer and later producer, as coinciding with the emergence of the heavy metal genre itself and its defining aesthetic criteria: the group pursuit of absolute musical and instrumental loudness. It was this driving aesthetic of pushing sound capture into the ‘red zone’ by means of instrumental speed, aggression, energy, and intensity, that provided the challenge for the young, up-and-coming studio engineers, like Birch, to find a way to capture the ‘live’ sound of the band in the studio and thereby ‘define’ on vinyl the heavy metal sound.