They were the first to make popular music purely from machines.

From the Summer Of Love, where acid house and ecstasy reigned supreme, to the birth of techno in light of political and social oppression.

How can you forget UKG rearing its mischievous, bumping head or even that behemoth they call EDM taking over the minds of millions around the world.

Whatever your preference, weve been truly spoiled and when it comes to albums, there have been some true cornerstones of relevance that have not only got us dancing, but inspired and influenced the next wave of artists to bring forth something, new, exciting and progressive.

Here we present the 50 most influential dance music albums of all time, no easy task to compile as you can imagine.

We called upon our bursting pool of contributors from over the years and our trusted members of staff to give an accurate representation of electronic musics evolution over the last four decades.

Here we go.

But the one who most captured other electronic artists imaginations is the late Delia Derbyshire.

Most famously with the original Dr Who theme, she brought avant-garde recording techniques and delirious sonic abstraction right into the heart of mainstream Britains living rooms.

An Electric Storm is hardly pop: its a brilliant and demented melange of easy listening, cosmic sex scenes, occult weirdness and synthesiser swooshes, in one sense pure Austin Powers 60s kitsch, in another utterly futuristic.

Certainly you can hear its blips and shimmying all the way through Broadcast, Boards of Canada, Stereolab, and even Flying Lotus and Madlib and its giddy dreams of the future are still highly playable in their own right.

Joe Muggs.

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But Tangerine Dream deserve a special place in history for their discovery of how to switch off gravity in this 40-minute musical levitation.

Scale becomes confused, you float off into the sound, and time ceases to exist.

Brian Eno would codify ambient some years later, but this was it created from pure instinct: closer to what the teenage Aphex Twin would do at the start of the 90s than anything of its time.

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The world is full nowadays of drones, dreamscapes and beatless sound sculptures but whatever they may present themselves as, chances are theyve got a little of this in them.

Summers second studio albums title track was initially released with little fanfare as an abridged 3-minute track, before Italian disco legend Giorgio Moroder had an unexpected brainwave: Summer should simulate orgasm throughout its extended, near-17 minute long run time.

One of the greatest disco tracks of all time, Summers orgasmic whelps inspired a generation of producers: you can hear her influence in the moans that pepper Lil Louis French Kiss over a decade later, helping to birth house music.

But theres so much more to the album than this sinuous, sexy disco cut.

The rest of the album is pretty killer hold tight for Need-a-man-Blues, a jaunty Moroder-written Italo track that has a way of looping around in your brain way after the initial run time is over.

In particular, Summer helped pioneer the use of electronic sequencers and electronic drums in dance music.

Prior to I Feel Love, dance music had been about funk: the idea that machines could make songs was relatively unheard of.

Then along came this smooth, machine-like sound with Summers shimmering vocals overlaid on top, and dance music was transformed.

Without Summer (and other contemporaries, like Kraftwerk), making this sequencer-led machine-made music, we wouldnt have techno, or most other subsequent dance music.

We owe Summer an enormous deal, even if her legacy is somewhat underrated.

Its hardly an exaggeration to say Dusseldorf four-piece Kraftwerk laid down the blueprint for all that followed.