made a deal with French label Carrere Records to fund, promote and release the album. While Adventures in Modern Recording was mostly a Horn solo project, Downes was still involved in the writing and production of "Vermillion Sands", "I Am a Camera" and "Lenny" (where he also handled the drum programming) and played keyboards on "Beatnik". Other collaboraters included Julian Mendelsohn and Gary Langan as engineers; Anne Dudley, who would later form The Art of Noise with Langan and Horn, as keyboardist on "Beatnik"; Horn's long-time collaborator Luis Jardim as percussion on "Beatnik"; and Yes bassist Chris Squire as providing "sound effects" for the title track. One of the tracks, "I Am a Camera," started as a Buggles demo that turned into a "slightly more overblown" track for their Yes collaboration album Drama (1980), named "Into the Lens"; although Horn appreciated the Yes version's "unadulterated" melody and complex arrangement, he liked the Buggles' recording more. Concept and sound A more left-field record than the Buggles' previous album The Age of Plastic (1980) as Horn planned it to be, Adventures in Modern Recording is a progressive electronic album containing both dance cuts and big-sounding tracks. It is stylistically and sonically diverse, as heard in "Vermillion Sands" alone; compared by Chris Roberts of BBC Music to Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody", the song consists of "electro-pop, harmony vocals, key signature changes, incongruous blasts of synthetic trumpet and boogie woogie piano and swing", described Mojos David Buckley. The title track mashes together electronic and acoustically made instruments, as well as dreamy and "hyper-alert" vibes, analyzed Joe Stannard of The Quietus. During the recording of the album, Horn also produced for the pop act Dollar; this influenced how he created Adventures in Modern Recording and in turn his works for Dollar. He envisioned the duo as a "technopop orchestra" playing at the Vermillion Sands hotel (the subject of one of the album's tracks). This not only gave Horn the idea of songwriting and production concepts for Adventures in Modern Recording, but also how the Buggles' visual aesthetic would change; the group went from two human players to a four-piece led by Horn and backed by three male dummies a la the Autons and members of Kraftwerk. Horn described producing Adventures in Modern Recording as a training of his production craft with experimentations of gear. Retrospective pieces have labeled it a document of how he would produce