With mentions of the likes of Eno, Kraftwerk, Neu, Can and Bowie in this thread, it seems worth mentioning a compilation album that has been recently released as a tribute to Connie Plank - producer/engineer to all the above (downloadable from all reputable downloading sites!)
Not an influential album of the seventies, per se, but a man partly responsible for many of the most influential. From his wikipedia page:
"His creativity as a sound engineer and producer helped to shape many innovative recordings of postwar European popular music, covering a wide range of genres including progressive, avant-garde, electronic music and krautrock. Plank and the bands he worked with in Germany had a strong influence on mainstream rock artists, some of whom were able to popularise aspects of his production technique and his highly distinctive sonic approach. He was one of the first European producers to fully exploit the possibilities of using multi-track recording facilities to create dramatic production effects and treatments that acted as musical and rhetorical elements in their own right, rather than mere gimmicks. During the 1970s Conny Plank produced and/or engineered many of the most important recordings by significant German progressive/experimental music acts (given the derogatory label krautrock by the UK music press and named after "Kraut", Plank's music publishing company at the time), including Kraftwerk (Kraftwerk, Kraftwerk 2, Ralf und Florian, Autobahn, and the precursor album Tone Float), Neu! (all their recordings), Cluster, Harmonia, Night Sun, Ash Ra Tempel, Holger Czukay (Can), and Guru Guru.
His body of work exerted a strong influence on some of the more adventurous British and American musicians and producers. The most notable are probably David Bowie and Brian Eno, who worked together on the late-70s 'Berlin Trilogy' of albums, Low, Heroes, and Lodger, all of which showed the strong influence of Plank's earlier German productions. Bowie's song 'Heroes' is a virtual paean to the Plank style, featuring radical sounds and dramatic alterations of sound in various elements, such as the lead vocal, to heighten the emotional or dramatic effect; this is placed against a swirling, droning electronic backing track that interweaves elements such as multitracked synthethisers and feedback guitar."
