Pop critic Jon Savage

A cinematic drone comes in fast from silence, quickly overtaken by two synthesised rhythm tracks that will go in and out of phase for the next lifetime. On top, Donna Summer soars and swoops as she tackles the minimal lyric: "It's so good [x five], "Heaven knows" [x five], "I feel love" [x five]. The words are so functional that her voice becomes another instrument, almost another machine, but then there is the real heart of the song: "Fallin' free, fallin' free, fallin' free …"

I Feel Love was and remains an astonishing achievement: a futuristic record that still sounds fantastic 35 years on. Within its modulations and pulses, it achieves the perfect state of grace that is the ambition of every dance record: it obliterates the tyranny of the clock – the everyday world of work, responsibility, money – and creates its own time, a moment of pleasure, ecstasy and motion that seems infinitely expandable, if not eternal.

Back in 1977, I Feel Love was a radical breakthrough, and was designed as such. It was started as a cut for I Remember Yesterday, an album that producer Giorgio Moroder originally planned as a mini-tour through dance music history: a Dixieland number here, a Tamla number there. To complete the project, he needed what NME called a "next-disco sound".

"I had already had experience with the original Moog synthesisers," Moroder told NME in December 1978, "so I contacted this guy who owned one of the large early models. It was all quite natural and normal for me. I simply instructed him about what programmings I needed. I didn't even think to notice that for the large audience this was perhaps a very new sound."

I Feel Love was quickly remixed and, extended to eight minutes on a 12in, made an immediate impact. As Vince Aletti wrote in his 13 August 1977 column for Record World, "perhaps the most significant development in disco sound this year is the success of totally synthesised music. Kraftwerk's Trans-Europe Express was the breakthrough record." Name-checking Space (whose all-synth Magic Fly was a huge UK hit in late summer 1977), Aletti observed that Kraftwerk's "impact was immediately underlined by Donna Summer's I Feel Love, which took the synthesiser rhythm and compressed and intensified it so it was both more physically exciting – like stepping into a tangle of high-voltage wires – and more commercial".

I Feel Love went to No 1 in the UK during the high summer of 1977, and stayed there for four weeks – filling dance floors everywhere, because it's so good so good to dance to. Like David Bowie's Low and Heroes, and Kraftwerk's Trans-Europe Express, it was also the secret vice of those punks who were already tiring of sped-up pub rock, and it sowed the seeds for the next generation of UK electronica.

It didn't chart as high in the States – No 6 – but it became an all-time gay classic, a totem of the pre-Aids era ("Fallin free, fallin' free, fallin' free"). That iconic status was reaffirmed by (Sylvester producer) Patrick Cowley's monumental 15-and-three-quarter-minute remix, which really does go on for ever and ever without trashing – even enhancing – the concept of the original.

I'm guessing many of you will have heard I Feel Love pumped out loud, will have felt moved to dance, and will have felt time stop, the instant prolonged. Something of that feeling attaches itself to the record wherever it's heard, and it never gets dulled by repetition – or endless imitation. I must have heard I Feel Love a thousand times and it still takes my breath away: it's one of the great records of the 20th century, and the name on the label is Donna Summer.

Record producer and DJ Ewan Pearson

I was only a child when Donna Summer released I Feel Love, that gargantuan behemoth of a record. But the sound of I Feel Love – that motorik, arpeggiated bassline – was the sound of my favourite dance records before dance music became Dance Music, and lots of my remixes have gone back to that kind of bassline.

Donna Summer was there at the start of Euro disco, and it's a familiar story to us in dance music: American artist becomes famous in Europe before it happens at home. She's an example of that weird connection between continents that dance music makes – she was a fluent German speaker. And she's remembered because, unlike a lot of the people who sang on the big Euro disco records, she looked like a star and she became a star in her own right: she was a star in a field that's often accused of not having any. And she was creative in her own right, too: she wrote the lyric to Love to Love You Baby, and gave it to Giorgio Moroder to turn into a full disco song.

She had a huge number of influential dance records – Love to Love You Baby, Our Love, Last Dance. Of course, I Feel Love overshadows everything. The Patrick Cowley megamix might be the greatest remix of all time: JD Twitch of Optimo says it's a record that has got him out of all sorts of trouble, though we didn't know if anyone had ever dared play the full 15 minutes of it. It's easy to underestimate it now; it's like Blade Runner – whenever you show that to someone younger, they're not impressed because it looks so familiar. Well, yes – that's because Blade Runner invented our idea of the future. It's the same with I Feel Love.

I've bemoaned many times that whenever guitar bands get popular again there's a sigh of relief, as if we're back to the way things should be. But dance music is ubiquitous, and I Feel Love is a reminder of its heritage. It's one of the greatest records ever and it will be always be remembered.