Jean-Michel Jarre is one of the reasons electronic music sounds so familiar today. The French composer and producer helped take it from the experimental fringes of the 1970s to some of the world's biggest stages. His sound sits somewhere between ambient, synth-pop and experimentation, built from looping sequences, strange textures and melodies that can stretch well beyond 15 minutes.

The story starts in 1976 with Oxygène. Jarre recorded it largely in his Paris flat with a handful of analogue synthesisers and an eight-track recorder. Labels weren't particularly interested in releasing an instrumental electronic album. It became an international hit anyway.

And that is where this playlist begins. From Oxygène in 1976, it follows Jarre through a career that included playing to an estimated one million people at Paris's Place de la Concorde, performing in post-Mao China and watching the strange electronic sounds he pioneered become increasingly mainstream.

One of the final tracks, Oxygène, Pt. 20, arrived in 2016 — exactly 40 years after the original. So think of this playlist as a small time machine: four decades of electronic music, heard through one artist who was there for almost all of it.