Those gags and whizbangs included sampled horn stabs and gunshots, arpeggios that sounded like haywire computers, angelic harp runs, and synthetic choirs chanting from the bottom of a digital abyss. Horn was one of the first musicians to buy a Fairlight CMI, the world’s first digital sampler. He immediately saw that its real potential lay not in faithfully emulating acoustic instruments, the way its manufacturers thought it might be used, but in the service of willful, glorious fakery: sounds whose envelopes of attack and release were more extreme than anything found in nature, with not enough echo or way too much of it; sounds like little cartoons of spring-loaded boxing gloves, punching their way to the front of the mix.
Maybe it was the mutual trust that Horn had with Yes as a onetime member of the band; or a sense that their music—with its own outlandish sonics, jarring interruptions, intricate riffs played once and tossed away—had more in common with his channel-surfing vision of pop than the average listener might have realized. Maybe he was so driven for a hit that he’d try anything. Whatever the case, this collaboration with a band past its sell-by date is his single most audacious production, marking the moment he went from being a promising producer to an era-defining one.
It’s also one of the craziest-sounding records ever made, period. Forty years on from its release, it still startles, coming off more like the Bomb Squad’s overstuffed productions for Public Enemy from a few years later, or Girl Talk’s candy-colored agglomerations of pop detritus from a couple of decades after that, than anything ever released under the banner of prog. Even the real instruments—the bricklike main riff, the spacious palm-muted lines, the toxic-sludge guitar solo—have been made to sound like samples in Horn’s collage: compressed, EQed, gated, and snapped to the grid, either digitally or through the metronomic precision of the players themselves.
Horn’s contributions to “Owner of a Lonely Heart” have earned Yes an unlikely place in the pantheon of hip-hop and electronic music history. No less an authority than Questlove has written that it contains the first-ever example of a drum beat sampled from another record, an innovation prefiguring everything from boom-bap to drum’n’bass. In its opening seconds, and again in the instrumental break, there are a few Fairlight-warped fragments of the drums from Funk, Inc.’s “Kool Is Back.” Through his work with McLaren, Horn had spent time around New York hip-hop DJs, who were already doing their own live and analog form of sampling by beat-juggling across two turntables; that he got to it first on record probably has as much to do with the Fairlight’s $25,000 price tag as anything else. Still, “Owner of a Lonely Heart”’s influence on sample-based music is deep. Art of Noise, one of the most important electronic music groups of the ’80s, arose directly out of the recording sessions, when Horn and a group of engineers and arrangers on his team realized that the production territory they were staking out could be the basis of a whole new project.
