“When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life,” said Samuel Johnson. It’s utter balls, of course. When someone’s tired of London, they’re probably just knackered and wouldn’t mind living somewhere with more trees, fewer people and in a house that isn’t partitioned off by papier-maché walls. For many, returning, like salmon to the counties that spawned them, is the obvious move.

Helmut Geir has been around the block multiple times but, like an electro-sonic Batman, always pops up just when he’s needed. Never much moved by fads, the Bavarian DJ-producer has always kept a foot in pre-house music styles, notably punk, Eighties synth-pop and Seventies electronica. His new album, only his fifth in a 25 year recording career, is, without doubt, his meisterwerk. Titled after the German for “Music of the Future”, a Wagnerian term, it’s actually retro-futurist in tone, yet so startlingly original and ambitious it posits directions for not only electronic music, but pop, rock, and anyone else listening.

If Kraftwerk were still in the business of creating music rather than laurel-resting, this might be where they'd choose to wander. Certainly “Car Car Car”, with its tick-tocking rhythm owes them a direct debt. “A car is a car/It drives you near or far/It transports us to all kinds of places,” run the heavily Vocodered lyrics. But that’s just the beginning of this tour de force. Two tunes later we hit “Army of Strangers” which comes on – convincingly - like an update of some offcut from one of Bowie’s Berlin albums. Then, later, “K House” appears to robot-channelling a film theme trapped in John Barry’s brainstem.

And what of the vocal sample-delic psychedelic Voodoo madness of “High Priestess of Hell”? Or the sitar techno with Albert Ayler-esque punk-bebop sax attack that is “Guede”? Or the ten minute bonus track, “Mantra”, which mutates the Buddhist “Om” into hypno-techno? Or "With u", a perfectly pared back electro-pop nugget featuring, of all people, The Stereo MCs? It’s an album that doesn’t quit for its 50 minutes-ish length, whether sleazing it up on the outright gay club whopper “I Want You” or recalling Bernard Herrmann’s “Taxi Driver” soundtrack on the slow, muzzy “2 Die 2 Sleep”.

Zukunftsmusik is utterly addictive. It does what a truly great album should: it astounds.

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Overleaf: Watch the Video for "Car Car Car" by DJ Hell

While the 36 records reviewed below run the gamut of Wreckless Eric to Democratic Republic of the Congo Afro-electronica, this month there’s also a special, one-off section for modern classical. This is due to an ear-pleasing haul of releases reaching theartsdesk on Vinyl lately.

For some of us Blur were an irritant during the 1990s rather than one of the decade’s premier bands. However, once Gorillaz arrived it was impossible to ignore Damon Albarn’s outrageous talent any longer. His golden touch ensured his cartoon group with artist Jamie Hewlett straddled not only multi-million-selling global success, but awed critical kudos. 2010’s The Fall album did not fare so well, but seemed to be a different kind of project, more experimental, cobbled together by Albarn on tour in the States, then fired out without extra polish.

The extent to which Gargoyle counts as a Mark Lanegan or Mark Lanegan Band album is debateable. The entire musical backings for six of its ten tracks were created in Tunbridge Wells by former Lanegan support band member Rob Marshall and made their way across the Atlantic via the internet. In Los Angeles, Lanegan then wrote lyrics and melody lines, and sang to what he had received. The other four tracks were recorded in California in a more traditional way with PJ Harvey/Queens of the Stone Age/Them Crooked Vultures associate Alain Johannes.

Fujiya & Miyagi are greater than the sum of their parts. Singer David Best recently explaned that he "sees it as an album rather than a compilation", but Fujiya & Miyagi’s sixth album is, essentially, a collection of three EPs, combining 2016’s EP1 and EP2 with three sparkling new tracks.

Un Voyage Á Travers Dans Le Paysage Électronique Français, the French subtitle, goes further. French Touch is the first exhibition to celebrate and dig into France’s electronic music heritage: exploring the lineage which laid the ground for the world-wide success of Daft Punk.

There is no band of the Eighties generation who've remained both as big, and as great, as Depeche Mode. Duran Duran? Lightweights. U2? Sunk into self-parody a long time ago. But the boys from Basildon are something else: they've come through all the pressures of fame, addiction, ageing and the rest with their mojo very much intact, sounding like themselves but still writing fresh songs and hitting new emotional spots.

The equipment pictured above is the Powertran 1024, one of the first digital sequencers to hit the market. According to the May 1981 issue of Electronics Today International magazine, which unveiled it to the public, the British-invented “1024 composer is a machine which will repeatedly cause a synthesiser to play a pre-determined series of notes either as short sequence or a large compositions of 1024 notes: i.e. several minutes long.” The article was headlined “Treat your synth to this sequencer/composer.”

Jean-Michel Jarre sometimes doesn’t receive the credit due to him from electronic music buffs. Whereas Kraftwerk, Tangerine Dream and Vangelis are held up as ground-breaking innovators of the 1970s, Jarre’s breakthrough 1976 hit "Oxygene IV" is not attributed the same kudos. Perhaps this is because it’s so ridiculously, almost irritatingly catchy. More likely it’s because it propelled its parent album, Oxygene, to multi-million-selling success, making an opulent global star of its creator.

Those who reject Jarre are doing him a disservice. It’s true that from the Eighties onwards his music lost some of its charm, not helped by his gigantic self-aggrandising mega-shows, but Oxygene and its successor, Equinoxe, contain music that’s as much of a template for certain forms of club-affiliated music - notably trance and chill-out - as anything out there. Now, following a couple of feisty, enjoyable albums where he collaborated with a who’s who of electronica, Jarre feels inspired to revisit his initial success with a third volume of Oxygene (a second appeared in 1996).

He retains the stripped-back, wafting instrumental prog-pop vibe of the album’s predecessors, although the main indication it’s an Oxygene album is the endless stoner-friendly wind noise whooshing smeared liberally over everything. There’s nothing as catchy as “Oxygene IV” here. How could there be? But “Oxygene 19” has a crafted, well-sequenced energy, opener “Oxygene 14” contains a twinkling synth motif at its core, and “Oxygene 17” is blissed-out, warm, floaty electro - almost house - that’s well worth a visit. The rest bubbles, pulses and squelches in an enjoyably retro way. Among other formats, Oxygene 3 is being released in triplicate with its predecessors, along with a coffee table book, and it’s easy to imagine that package bought on vinyl by those who might once have liked to have been hippies, decades ago, but got decent jobs instead. They’ll settle down after a decent weekend meal, take out their neatly boxed and hidden hash stash, roll a bifter, whack Oxygene 3 on a turntable recently rescued from the attic, and float off, just as they did 40 years ago. And why not...

Overleaf: listen to Oxygene 3 preview