Kraftwerk cassettes

    RALF & FLORIAN (1976, France) Philips 7105 147   In celebration of my 50th post on this blog, a raritity. Ralf & Florian was released in many more editions after Autobahn was a hit, and through the latter half of the seventies, many reissues were put out internationally. Especially, I'll wish good luck to anyone trying to get every LP variant from the US of this, they seem to still be discovered. Cassettes seem to be a far simpler story, with one edition per country - if even that. So far I've come across five different editions, this one, which came out in France in 1976, is apparently the rarest of them. For the record, the ones I know about are the original German version, which was out in 1973, then in 1975, it was issued on cassette in the US and Australia; France in 1976 and finally, Spain in 1979. None of these show up very often, I suppose, but this wasn't even listed in Discogs until 2022, and was largely unknown outside of die-hard collector circuits...

    RADIO-ACTIVITY (1976, France)  Capitol/ EMI/ Pathe Marconi 2 C 242-82087 Having posted the second edition recently, I thought it fitting to follow up with this, a first edition. As said in that other post , there are only minor differences to the two, including the catalog number - this edition has the 2 C prefix followed by 242-82087, the other edition has number 2 C 244-82087. Both cassettes have simple 1-panel J-cards, and on-body print instead of paper labels (in some countries, I've seen that paper labels seem to be the norm for first editions, being replaced with on-body print after that first run, but I have no info to suggest there ever was a French edition of this with paper labels). Grey cassettes on both accounts, but black print on this which is substituted for blue on the second edition, and the Pathe Marconi logo on that does not include EMI. Hm, doesn't this indicate that the "2 C 244-82087" edition is actually earlier than the 242 one? Both hav...

  THE MIX (Poland, 1991?) Tomzo Music News 0454   Time for a light-hearted release, methinks! Here's a funny one, another unofficial Polish edition, where they obviously knew better than to stick a grumpy robot on the front cover!   Poland is fascinating as cassettes go (and of course, in many other aspects that this blog does not mention). Apparently, anyone with a double cassette deck could print up a run of cassettes and carry them down to the local market to sell, and the amount of different editions is simply staggering. Odd compilations, split tapes with Kraftwerk on one side and another artist on the other, and the official albums, even the German-sung editions, and if I'm not mistaken, none of them "legal" in any West-European, major label definition of the term.   For Polish editions of The Mix, cassettes were often standard 60 minutes of length, and of course, the album runs for some 65 minutes. This is solved in different ways, in this case by simply cutt...

  TRANS EUROPA EXPRESS (Germany, 1985) EMI ELECTROLA 1C 264-82 306 German cassettes are important, if you want to collect Kraftwerk cassettes; as seen in many previous posts on this blog, Kraftwerk took the design seriously and went beyond the usual LP facsimiles of the era, and of course, starting from this release, the songs were translated to English on the international releases. So to hear the songs sung in their original German, the domestic release is paramount (with a couple of notable exceptions of course!). Germany being Germany, I kind of expected it to be a fairly simple task, too - ordnung muss sein, right?10 albums, maybe budget reissues of the biggest sellers, and a compilation or two? Of course it turns out there are some variants of most releases, here as anywhere. Here for instance is a mid-80s reissue, in a replica of the original sleeve - and on the cassette itself, "Made in EEC". The 1977 edition had a 2-panel J-card, to make room for a panel of other rel...