After years and years of explorations to the outer reaches of the international music biz, just how much truly extraordinary music still remains unearthed?

Cynically thinking, not that much: a good 90% of the much-enthused about experimental German music of the late 60′s and 70′s turned out to consist of interminable turgid narco-jams (the remaining 10%, of course, being pure unadulterated genius). Then again, African countries continue to unveil buried treasures on a regular basis, and even a country with as hectic a music market as US can produce curveballs such as Eccentric Soul’s electro funk epos Personal Space from last year.

This compilation from Because Music belongs to a special branch of the ever-active rediscovery and repackaging industry: an attempt to recalculate the value of pioneering cuts that were left under-appreciated behind language or other barriers and which now, years after the event, seem to form something of a scene.

Cosmic Machine unearths 20 slices of electronic music made in France between 1970 and 1980, years before genres or brackets existed for this sort of thing, back when the country’s music scene was meant to have lagged aeons behind higher-rated neighbours in a fog of accordion-clutching stereotypes. Often, what may have been hopelessly obscure back then has since become comprehensively mainstream: it’s temptingly easy to draw parallels between the vocoder vocals and Steely Dan-under-a-mirror-ball vibes of Space Art’s ‘Love Machine’ and the disco-hopping soft rock stylings of Daft Punk, the best-known purveyors of modern French electro.

Are we faced with a revelation or a rewriting of the music annals equivalent to German electronic music of the same era? Not quite: whilst the bands filed under the somewhat unsavoury ‘Krautrock’ flag are revered for staging an entirely new, timeless union between man and machine, there’s little startlingly original or boundary-pushing amongst the, say, the juicy disco bass of ‘Motel Show’ by Pierre Bachelet or the jubilant synth melodies of Universal Energy’s ‘Disco Energy’, which bring to mind a particularly fromage-encrusted theme to a soap opera of Love Boat vintage.

Taken purely as a compilation of music, as opposed to an after-the-event building of a scene, though, Cosmic Machine is for the most part hugely enjoyable and admirably diverse. ‘Ombilic Contact’ by the Atomic Crocus is, down to the mega-far out band name, like particularly funky prog-rock. ‘Shanti Dance’ by the Droids and ‘Magic Fly’ by Space cruise down the autoroute with irresistible momentum. The relentless repetition of Rene Roussel’s ‘Caramel’ sounds like a lost proto-house nugget, whilst Quartz and Didier Marouani provide moments of decidedly avant-garde inner space exploration.

It doesn’t all work. Sounding like a theme to an 80′s cop show, Serge Gainsbourg’s ‘Le Physique et le Figure’ is far from his finest moment. ‘Black Bird’ by Jean Michel Jarre – probably the second best known name here – sounds like a square Popol Vuh who don’t quite believe in what they’re doing: it’s no wonder Jarre later swapped live instruments for entirely synthetic sounds. DVWB’s bubbly ‘Aqua’ is like the soundtrack to a retro-futuristic training video, whilst ‘Rocket Man’ by Rockets is a spectacularly jarring blast of hyperactive squeals and bleeps.

The finest moments, which combine the lure of the dance floor with some genuinely cosmic aspirations, make up for the occasional missteps. Frederic Mercier’s pulsating, extended ‘Spirit’ is a thoroughly heady trip that fishes successfully for total hypnosis, not to mention predicting the hypnotic repetition of dance music when the word house only referred to constructs folks work and live in.