Kraftwerk cassettes

THE MAN·MACHINE (Spain, 1978) Capitol 10C 246 85444 A Spanish cassette edition of The Man·Machine today, sometimes I get new items in, and immediately write about them, but here's one I've had for years... It's a nice item, too, like so many Spanish cassettes! Famously, Spanish pressings of most if not all Kraftwerk releases from the 1970's had the titles translated to Spanish. In this case, the international artwork is pictured on the front, with it's English title as usual, but printed above it is the legend "El Hombre Maquina". For some reason, this sparked a lengthy musing on my part about whether "Hombre" translates as "Human being" in the same way as "Man" does in English; after all, the German title uses "Mensch", not "Mann", and, well - but realising we need not go into this, I'll just crack on. The Spanish market is ripe with variants and interesting items, and - well, at least until recently,...

RADIO-ACTIVITY (Italy, 198?) Capitol 54 1820874 As I delve deeper into my cassette collection, there are a few variants - items that are quite similar to ones I've posted here before, but not identical. Today it's another version of an Italian reissue, with a couple of notable differences to a previous post .   The reissue - ie the one with the "54" cat.no, which replaced the earlier edition with the cat.no starting with 3C - came in a couple of variants. This one has a clear cassette shell with black on-body print. The J-card is 1-panel, printed on one side, although replicating the print from the 2-panel version I posted before . And although it's simply guesswork on my part, I do think this edition came after the white one. So there you have it, kind of an interim post today, but I hope you like it!       

THE MIX (Canada, 1991) Elektra 96 8694 Today, I bring you the Canadian edition of The Mix. It's not what you'd call a major collectable, I suppose, but I haven't had an official The Mix for ages, so - here it is! There are not as many different editions of The Mix as there are of the albums before it. Cassette releases sort of had a window in Western Europe, where from the mid-70s to the early '90s, popular albums would see reissues and variants across the territories. I think you can find three times as many official versions of The Man-Machine or Autobahn as of this one! In fact, this is the last one I own that I haven't posted, so I must rush out and find the remaining few... They're quite rare though so who knows. Anyway. Again, the packaging is more or less based on the German/ EU release, via USA;  4-panel J-card, including full-size backflap, printed on both sides. The songwriting/publishing credits and larger print for the other liner notes are pretty...

LA DÜSSELDORF: INDIVIDUELLOS (Germany, 1980) Teldec, 4.24524 CR Branching out a little further in 2026, here's another cassette that isn't strictly speaking by Kraftwerk. We've had some "Related artists" before though, so it feels logical to follow that trail a bit further. Klaus Dinger played drums on Side 2 of the first Kraftwerk LP, and stayed on as a member for nearly a year. Florian Schneider, Michael Rother and Dinger started work on the second Kraftwerk album, but sessions were aborted, Hütter returned and Rother and Dinger formed Neu!. The duo put out three brilliant albums, before personal relations had soured beyond repair and the band was no more. Rother went solo, and Dinger started La Düsseldorf, recruiting his brother Thomas Dinger and Hans Lampe. From 1976-1980, three albums were released, before relations again were so strained that they could not work together any more. One gets the impression that Klaus Dinger may have been difficult to work with...

EXPO 2000 (Scandinavia, 2025) unofficial - home-made No label, no cat.no In the quiet week before the New Year - just a bit of fun for once! This blog explores the art of collecting through the medium of cassettes. I've touched frequently upon what I collect, and what I do not collect, although this has also changed as the collection develops (or grows, as I don't think I've ever taken stuff out of the collection once I've made room for it!). I started out focusing on official releases, but soon realised that not all countries even could get the cassettes officially, and that the line between official and un-official can be more blurred in some countries than it is in my homeland... And here's the first cassette which I define as "home-made", as in, not duplicated and with a cover not printed professionally, and with no connection to the record industry - _or_ with a view to selling the item. It was given me for Christmas. My brother thought it a shame tha...

KARL BARTOS: Communication (2003, Japan) Sony, no cat.no Ending the year with something different, here's a relatively new one - from 2003. Karl Bartos' solo album "Communication" was of course not released on cassette, because cassettes were not needed in most countries where it was released, but they made a promo cassette for Japan, and - well, this is that! The cassette has a November 2003 release date; of course, this promo could be made a few weeks before, but I think Kraftwerk's Tour De France Soundtracks came in August. Musically, it nods back to the sound of Elektric Music's "Esperanto" album, pretty much in the same vein as the music he wrote for Kraftwerk, and some familiar synth sounds, percussion and computer voices. The promo cassette includes the two remixes that were also bonus tracks on the Japanese CD edition (in fact, European CD-rom editions of the album had a download link to get the remixes, but they were not on the physical CD)....