Kraftwerk cassettes

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,...

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...