moments in love wasn’t predictable at all, that song was basically completely unprecedented in production and structure. i wouldn’t call it pop either. it’s a byproduct of synthpop, sure, but it’s also a byproduct of the dancier, post-punk-ish industrial of the early 80s. the closest you would get to it outside of its direct influences would likely be early versions of remixes, especially dub remixes. but then again, dub could easily have been an influence too. art of noise was an attempt, with heavy trevor horn involvement, at creating avant-garde music with techniques usually reserved for more "academic" music in a way that would work in a popular context but without "hiding" its experimentation
compare it to minor hits like this
[MEDIA=youtube]T1fQZg2oVno[/MEDIA]
or even to more pop-minded crossover acts like DAF and front 242
[MEDIA=youtube]D2Mr9BH8JUY[/MEDIA]
you can see the more surface level influences to it quite clearly here, but only individual elements spread out amongst them. moments in love was an incredibly NEW! and NOW! thing that became incredibly popular around europe in general despite not doing that well in charts. it's not only that they were creating collages of sound to mimic musique concrete using then-revolutionary samplers, it's that this entire sound was completely new, that airy minimal production with loads of space between all the sounds was new, and i think the fact that it manages to have such a minimal sound despite how much is actually going on is pretty impressive. being arguably a downtempo track in 85 despite trip hop not being "invented" until 1990, just by pure coincidence is pretty cool too. the fact that it seems predictable to you is less a criticism of the song and more the SHEER RAW POWER it's had across a wide spread of music. that's not to say "you're not allowed to think it's generic!!! it was new!!!" but i just presumed that the song and group are new to you from these posts
i didn't know it was popular with black people or that it was influential to techno though
[spoiler]i need to use quotes less but i don't know how else to indicate what i mean when i put words in quotes. i also just realized that i might be using quotation marks where i should be using apostrophes, too[/spoiler]
