Suspended in Time: Moments in Love, the Art of Noise, and the Night Detroit Listened

When I think back to Detroit in the early eighties, the nights are always longer in memory than they were in life. The city was both burning and rebuilding, still carrying the ghosts of industry and Motown but already listening for what might come next. The radio was a lifeline then, not just background noise. And if you were lucky enough to find WJLB after dark, you entered the strange, spellbound orbit of the Electrifying Mojo. He was unlike any other DJ, not a salesman, not a hype man, but a curator of the unexpected. He might put Prince next to Kraftwerk, Parliament next to Yellow Magic Orchestra, and make you believe they were all having the same conversation. One night, he dropped the needle, or rather, pressed play, on something I had never heard before, and in truth, still haven’t heard again in quite the same way. It was slow, impossibly slow. A pulse, a few suspended chords, and then space, not the silence of absence, but the space of something being built with deliberate patience. Moments in Love by Art of Noise.

At the time, I knew nothing about the group. I didn’t know they had just released an EP called Into Battle with the Art of Noise on ZTT Records in 1983, or that their music was built around one of the most cutting-edge digital instruments of the day, the Fairlight CMI. I didn’t know that its members,  Anne Dudley, J. J. Jeczalik, Gary Langan, Trevor Horn, and Paul Morley,  had come from the collision point of pop production, avant-garde experimentation, and journalism. I only knew that the song did something most music on the radio didn’t: it refused to rush. It asked you to wait. In a city that measured so much of life in beats per minute, in production quotas and car lines and the hum of industry, this track simply floated, daring you to slow down with it.

Mojo understood the power of context. He didn’t just play a track; he set it in orbit among others, so that when Moments in Love drifted in, it was framed not as a novelty, but as a transmission from the same place that gave us Beat Box, “Planet Rock,” and Computer World. Detroit in 1983 was quietly inventing a new language of rhythm and machine, what would become techno,  and Moments in Love spoke to the other side of that language. If Juan Atkins and Derrick May were about propulsion, this was about suspension. If Beat Box was the body, this was the breath.

The EP itself was a statement of purpose. Into Battle wasn’t a traditional pop release. It was a patchwork of tracks that blurred the line between song and sound collage. “Beat Box” hit underground dance floors. “Close (to the Edit)” would later become a hit in its reworked form. But “Moments in Love” was the anomaly, ten minutes of minimal structure, almost no percussion, built around a repeating harmonic progression that felt both romantic and alien. Anne Dudley’s keyboard voicings gave it warmth, but the textures were undeniably digital, the product of the Fairlight’s sampling engine. The group used the sampler not to mimic “real” instruments but to build a new emotional vocabulary: breathy pads, choral fragments, and clipped sounds that were as much about texture as melody.

It’s easy to forget how radical that was in 1983. Sampling was still in its infancy, and most uses of it were in the service of novelty, dropping in a recognizable soundbite or using a short loop as a gimmick. Art of Noise treated it as a composition, sculpting the samples until they were the music, not an adornment to it. In Moments in Love, this meant every element was chosen for its ability to sustain a mood over a long stretch of time. The percussion was sparse, almost hesitant. The melody barely rose or fell. The interest came from the way textures shifted, the way reverb and decay created the illusion of movement inside stasis. It was music that worked like a minimalist painting: the longer you looked, the more you saw.

Detroit audiences, especially those tuned in to Mojo’s midnight voyages, were primed for this kind of listening. The early techno innovators were already mining European synthpop and German electronic music for ideas. Kraftwerk had shown that machines could be funky. George Clinton had shown that funk could be cosmic. Moments in Love showed something else: that electronic music could be intimate, sensual, even tender, without sacrificing its otherness. That message stuck. You can trace a line from this track through the downtempo experiments of late-80s R&B, through the atmospheric interludes in early techno records, into the trip-hop of the 1990s.

The cultural journey of the track after 1983 is a lesson in how music moves through time without losing its core. In the mid to late 80s, it was sampled and quoted in hip-hop, sometimes as a loop, sometimes as a hidden texture. It found its way into the quiet storm format alongside Sade and Luther Vandross, proving that machine-made music could live in the same space as the most human of voices. In Europe, fashion designers began to use it on runways, its languid pace turning models’ walks into rituals. By the early 90s, ambient house pioneers like The Orb and KLF were working with the same logic: long-form, looping, hypnotic tracks meant as much for drifting as for dancing. In Bristol, the architects of trip-hop took its lesson to heart, slowing the beat until every snare hit felt like an event.

By the mid-90s, Moments in Love had become a kind of cultural shorthand. In films and TV, it often appeared in scenes meant to convey romance, sophistication, or self-aware parody. In advertising, it was the go-to choice for perfume spots and high-end fashion brands wanting to suggest timeless allure. The joke was that it could serve as the soundtrack to either a seduction scene or a comedy sketch about seduction, and in both cases, it worked.

The 2000s brought revival and nostalgia. Crate-digging producers like J Dilla and DJ Shadow sampled it, either directly or by reference, folding its DNA into new beats. Luxury brands brought it back for ad campaigns. Wedding videographers discovered it for slow-motion montage. On YouTube, it became both a sincere romance and an ironic wink. And in the streaming era, it lives on in playlists with titles like “Chill,” “Late Night Drive,” “Romantic Evening,” often stripped of attribution, as if it had always just existed, floating in the cultural ether.

What makes it endure isn’t just the melody or the mood. It’s that it was never about chasing a momentary sound. Minimalism doesn’t date the same way maximalism does; the fewer moving parts a track has, the less likely it is to age out of fashion. Moments in Love is built like an emotional space rather than a statement, so it can be re-entered again and again, each time shaped by the context you bring to it. A teenager in Detroit in 1983 heard the future in it. A trip-hop producer in 1994 heard a kindred spirit. A Gen Z listener today might just hear something that feels calmer, slower, and more deliberate than the noise around them.

I come back to that night in Detroit because it’s a reminder of what deep listening can do. The manifesto for this blog talks about resisting the churn, about slowing down and treating culture as more than disposable content. Moments in Love embodies that ethos. It’s art that doesn’t tell you what to feel in the first thirty seconds. It waits for you. It trusts you. It rewards the kind of attention most media today doesn’t even bother to ask for.

And maybe that’s why it’s survived,  because in a world obsessed with acceleration, it’s a work of deliberate deceleration. It proves that intimacy can be built in restraint, that electronic textures can be as emotive as any string section, and that a piece of music can travel across genres, decades, and technologies without losing the core of what makes it matter. It doesn’t need to shout. It just needs to be there, waiting, the way it was waiting for me that night, the city outside settling into darkness, the radio signal carrying a message from somewhere just ahead of us.

Album cover for Into Battle with the Art of Noise, ZTT ZTIS 100 / Island 90137 (USA), 1983. Copyright ZTT Records / Island Records, used under fair use for purposes of critical commentary

Art of Noise promotional photograph (circa 1990s), photographer unknown, used for identification and commentary purposes.

Electrifying Mojo portrait (1981) by Leni Sinclair, used for historical commentary.