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…