After a failed session with engineer Mick Harris, Bailey recorded his overlaid guitar improvisations in Bill Laswell's New York City studio in October 1995, slightly altering Ninj's contributions to remove electric piano passages.

Ninj's drum and bass backing is thudding and minimal, while Bailey's guitar playing is inventive, loud and fast, incorporating truncated licks, heavy distortion and chiming sounds.

"[1]Bailey's experiments also included an additional, 'random' element as a result of the broken cassette player he had been using to tape the pirate radio broadcast.

"[1] American avant-garde musician John Zorn approached Bailey shortly afterwards, asking him to record three albums with alternate rhythm sections–including dub bassist Bill Laswell, noise rock group Ruins and drummer Tony Williams.

Bailey's "accelerated" jungle radio bootlegs "seemed to offer amazing possibilities" for the project,[1] so the guitarist sent a tape of his drum and bass-backed improvisations to Zorn and suggested to him that he could make an album of it.

Although Bailey was able to set up the day before, he realised the studio had no suitable armless chairs for him to sit on as he improvised, this being his traditional recording set-up.

He briefly tried to use the studio's drum stool, but it was broken and "kind of weaved around," so it was "a fairly skillful business" for Bailey to sit upright on it.

[2] Returning the next day to record, he realised the problems turned towards Harris, who Bailey felt was incapable of mixing a Digital Audio Tape or live instrument.

[3] Rick Anderson of AllMusic described Guitar, Drums 'n' Bass as possibly "the first program of guitar/breakbeat duets" ever recorded,[4] whilst in The Sunday Times, Stewart Lee called the album "perhaps the most abrasive retake on the drum'n'bass formulas to date.

[4] Ninj's thudding drum and bass music on the album, described by Lee as exemplifying the genre at its most minimalist,[5] is mixed into the background, which gives the percussion sound "a certain off-hand flavour.

[11] According to Simon Reynolds, the appearance of the album in 1996 was during a period when many disparate artists experimented with jungle and drum and bass, citing Bailey's experiments as one example of a non-jungle artist "dabbling with sped-up breakbeats" in this era, alongside jazz-pop duo Everything but the Girl and techno producers Aphex Twin and Underworld.

Ninj were "an inspired pairing" and also citing the album as an example of Bailey "[p]referring the company of percussionists and even jungle DJs over other [guitar] players.

"[15] Stewart Lee, writing for The Sunday Times in 1997, was very favourable, calling the album a "difficult, demanding but ultimately thrilling and utterly unique experience" and describing Bailey's guitar playing as "ceaselessly inventive."

Comparing the album to David Bowie's then-new drum and bass-influenced single "Little Wonder" (1997), he said "Bailey's use of drum'n'bass could never be suspected of cashing in on a fad.

"[17] Roughly marking the start of Bailey's late 1990s genre experiments,[7] Guitars, Drums 'n' Bass is cited in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography 2005–2008 as among the examples of where, "[refusing] to rest on his laurels, [Bailey] undertook a series of encounters that were criticised for their lack of improvisational purity, but steadfastly followed his desire to explore unexpected playing situations.

"[18] Other examples that were also encouraged by John Zorn were his album with the Ruins, Saisoro (1994), and his Jamaaladeen Tacuma and Calvin Weston collaboration Mirakle (1999).

They cited the album–"Derek Bailey puts free improvisation into conversation with drum 'n' bass"– as a key example, alongside Sonic Youth mixing punk rock with the work of experimental music pioneers like Pauline Oliveros on SYR4: Goodbye 20th Century (1999), house and techno producers remixing Steve Reich's composition on the Reich Remixed (1999) album and Björk's collaborations with electronic duo Matmos and free jazz percussionist Chris Corsano, among other examples.