Avant-garde, Industrial-adjacent

In a 2003 article on the greatest musique concrète for Pitchfork, musician Drew Daniel of Matmos included “Close (To the Edit)” in a list of works that arguably built upon musique concrète in new ways.[6] Simon Reynolds highlighted the manner in which the music video provided a “witty visual emblem” for the group’s “updated version of musique concrète’s slice-and-dice methods.”[7] He also noted that the song can be contextualised as “a homage to Kraftwerk and their ‘Autobahn’-era notion of the car as a musical instrument”, due to the use of a revving motor as a melodic riff throughout Art of Noise’s hit.[7] The track is classified as sound collage by writer Robert Fink, who notes that the track features the ‘ORCH5’ orchestral hit which, in its final moments, mixes “back into congeries of sampled orchestral blasts from Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring.”[8] Danny Turner of MusicRadar commented that the track highlights Art of Noise’s “clever use of disembodied vocal samples and found sounds”, and noted that it “arguably featured the first ever sampled and sequenced bass line.”[9] -wikipedia