Inventing an entirely new musical genre, crossing rock with electronic, pop with huge avant garde concepts, where in a vision of a mechanistic, Thatcherite future, robots can wake you with a smile and obey your every command and men can fall in love with a film studio, is no easy task.Inventing the recording technology as you go in order to make that creative vision come true is quite another, yet Geoff Downs and Trevor Horn achieve this by flooding the listener, from the first click of the needle on the vinyl, which even on the digital remaster you can feel reaching out across the years to your ears, invoking nostalgia in anyone who aches for a time when the simplicity of pure song craft met the wave of post 70's experimentation in sound synthesis and gave rise to the MIDI era of music production technology.There is not a single producer working in the whole of the music industry, past, present or future who wouldn't give their right arm to call any one of the master pieces on this work there own. Little wonder then that Horn later shot to fame as the man behind such multi-platinum selling works as diverse as Seal's 'Kiss from a Rose', Franky goes to Hollywood's 'Relax', Band Aid's 'Do they know it's Christmas?' and 'Owner of a lonely Heart', by the British prog-rock group he would also later briefly join, Yes.On 'Age of plastic' Horn's fastidious attention to detail is a master class to any budding musician with an eye on high fidelity, musical synthesis. It might not sound like any sort of achievement today, where a sample of just about any instrument sound imaginable is just a click of a Mac OS mouse away - but in the early 1980's everything had to be imagined, planned and programmed in advance. Horn employed ground breaking sound on sound recording techniques to build layers of soundscapes, which prompted one lecturer this writer once had the chance to study with to note that, on a visit he paid to SARM, horn's west London studio, since there was at the time no such thing as a stand alone sound module, quote, "Nothing can prepare you for the sight and sound of 20 Yamaha DX7's all MIDI'ed up in series to produce just one string pad".Buggles were a short lived group, despite the accolades afforded this and their follow-up album 'Adventures In Modern Recording' and the world-wide number one hit single 'Video Killed the radio star', but 'Age of plastic', effectively Horn's show reel and announcement to the world that well engineered, properly recorded music doesn't have to sound sterile, guarantees that an album recorded as long ago as 'Age of Plastic', sounds as if it could have been recorded today and probably should have been.Buy it.