Kraftwerk cassettes

 RADIO-ACTIVITY (USA, Club Edition, 1975?) Capitol, 4XT 511547 Time for another obscurity... Here is the sought-after "Club Edition" of Radio-Activity. I was not even aware there was a club edition of this, before it was up on ebay. I didn't really know why there were these club editions either, but after some research (ok, I asked a friend from the US and googled it), I think the story goes like this:  There was a music club called Columbia House. (Probably others too, but never mind them.) The idea was to get people to subscribe to music, via mail order, for a monthly fee, and it was such a success that from the early '70s on, Columbia House would issue their own pressings both on LP and cassette (in fact, there were also 8-track cartridges andeven reel-to-reel tapes!). The music was divided into categories and catalogues, where you'd get the months biggest new release from some major artist or other, and then there was a lot of back catalogue, where members cou...

 TRANS-EUROPE EXPRESS (Italy, 1987) Capitol 54 1851104 Finally I present Trans-Europe Express on my blog, here in an Italian re-edition from 1987. I expect the record company enjoyed a renewed interest in the band's back catalogue after their first new album in five years had come the year before? Or who knows, maybe they just thought a new cover design would help them shift some more units. Italy is an interesting country to collect Kraftwerk cassettes, there's a lot of variants with each release, often a bit of care has gone into the design, and - best of all to the aspiring collector - if you're lucky, some of them can be found quite cheap. 1970s editions come in different coloured shells and cases, with 1 or 2-panel J-cards, and surprising amounts of variations in small details. (As far as I can gather, all Italian cassettes carry a "S.I.A.E" stamp on the spine, I suppose for tax reasons? Not sure though, I should look into it.) Then there's the 1987 serie...

EDGAR LUSTGARTEN - AN HOUR WITH EDGAR ALLAN POE (UK, 1974) Times Cassettes, WLA 0001 Here's a weird anomaly for Kraftwerk fans: A reading of a selection of Edgar Allan Poe tales, with occasional incidental music lifted from the (then) most recent Kraftwerk album!  Our reader, Mr. Edgar Lustgarten was born in 1907, according to his brief biographical data on the J-card, and this came in 1975. so he was already in his 68th year at this point... And it may be just my prejudice, but I would have thought that if an elderly actor was given a choice of what music to use in the background of his readings, he'd perhaps not jump at the latest electronic avant garde? In other words, whose idea was it to stick bits of Kraftwerk underneath these tales of Mystery and Imagination? Did they arrive at the studio and find they had forgot their LP of Brahms string quartets?  Listening to the cassette it would seem like the music was a deliberate choice, it is edited and segmented and 'treated...

 THE MIX (Poland, 1991?) Mercurton MT 307 Poland is a fascinating country when it comes to cassettes! There are a multitude of different releases, and unless I'm much mistaken, they are all unofficial - meaning that they have no connection to the rights holders and I suppose paid no royalty to the artists involved. Judging by the multitude of unofficial releases, this was a big industry in Poland at the time! Kraftwerk's 1991 album of re-recordings, The Mix, was issued in loads of different variants, and while they generally sound fine, they often pay little attention to detail; many releases would change the track running order, to save tape on having the cassette sides as equal of length as possible, sometimes, tracks from different releases would be added or substituted, and in the particular instance I present today, the credits list appears to have been misunderstood as the track list! 1991 is well into the CD age, which I suppose is one reason why The Mix had many more va...