Kraftwerk cassettes

THE MAN·MACHINE (Portugal, 19?) Unofficial - Black, 058 A quick one today: YET another unofficial copy of "The Man·Machine", this time from Portugal!  I don't really have a lot of information about this one, but "Black" is a Portuguese cassette pirate label, that ran from at least 1978-1981, maybe before, maybe after. They jumbled up the track list, omitting "Metropolis", and dividing the rest into two 15-minute programmes.    The cover has blue background, a strangely cropped picture of the LP cover (including "AFTWERK" in the top left corner!). The cassette is black, with white paper labels.  

THE MIX (India, 1994) EMI STSC 890217/ EM 1408 Finally, I got an Indian edition of The Mix. I've been searching for one for years, and finally I decided to splash out on one! As I've said before, there are not as many different editions of The Mix as of the albums from Autobahn to Electric Cafe. It's sort of logical; by the late 90s, cassettes were a niche product in Western Europe, and there was little point in reissues and Nice Price editions. Most countries would just put this out once, then refer customers to the CD shelf if they wanted to make a purchase. India has a different policy with reissues than most places. I have few Indian editions, of several albums, and they are often dated on the spine, and have the recommended retail price printed there too. For instance, I know of copies of The Man-Machine dated both 10/88 and 11/88, so there could be quite a lot of very slightly different variants out there yet to be documented. Today's cassette is marked with ...

COMPUTER WORLD (Japan, 1981) EMI ZR28-613, EMS-91030 I've been looking forward to posting this, my first Japanese Kraftwerk cassette! As you can see, here's Computer World! Music fans all over the world love Japanese releases. Whether it's vinyl records, CDs or cassettes, Japan has had a history of going the extra mile with their physical product. Extras like bonus tracks, picture inserts, stickers, lyric sheets and OBIs are commonplace, and cassettes typically came with a long text insert inside, and a glorious outer slipcase! My pictures hardly do the item justice. The slipcase makes the front a little larger, and the Japanese text adds to the beauty of the front. On the back of the slipcase, the tracklist in both English and Japanese, and if Google translate is to be trusted, a short blurb about the album. Inside the slipcase is a standard cassette case, with a 4-panel insert. Here we get a Kraftwerk time-line on one side, and on the other: The lyrics, or more exactly s...

AUTOBAHN (1985, Canada) Warner Bros. 92 53264 Taking us back to the Canadian "Super Cassettes", today I present another 1985 variant of Autobahn. The Elektra edition was posted here  two years ago , so this post brings us up as far as I've come on the subject! As I said before, the "Super Cassette" or ("Super C Cassette"?) isn't really all that super, they had a plan to make cassettes sound better, but it wasn't really radical. Personally, I think the changes around 1990 were more important, but CDs had largely taken over by then anyway. So for me, it's simply a fun logo to make my cassettes look different. Like the previous one, this too came in a 1-panel J-card with print on both sides, and a full-panel backflap. In fact, the whole cassette looks very similar to the Elektra edition, even down to he cassette being black with silver on-body print. The only significant difference is the Elektra logo on that other one and the Warner logo he...

  RALF & FLORIAN (Spain, 1979) Philips 71 05 147 Another Spanish cassette already? Sure. We've had some early works compilations, but it's a while since I had an actual, full early album on the blog... So today, I bring you a Spanish issue of Ralf & Florian, from 1979! I think it's the last time this album was reissued on cassette officially... Surprisingly, this edition is more "German" than the German edition - design is quite similar to the German LP. The German cassette, elsewhere on the blog, used a different typeface on the front, and yet another on the spine, whereas Spain went for the gothic lettering on the front, and the cassette standard on the spine. Strangely, they use the German "Seite 1" and "Seite 2", rather than Spanish indicators like "Cara" or "Pista" which I've seen on others, or even the English "Side", as per some other early one s. Possibly they copied the information from a G...

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,...