Kraftwerk cassettes

KRAFTWERK 2 (1979, Spain) Philips 71 05 249   A first on this blog, the second Kraftwerk album. Hard to come by and the pride of my collection, this, the Spanish edition, is the only place I have the full Kraftwerk 2 on cassette. The Spanish edition came in 1979, and the album has not been reissued since. Kraftwerk seems to have sold well in Spain, there were a lot of singles (vinyl, I mean!), all the albums have several editions, so I suppose that's why the two first albums came on cassette and LP in 1979; simply a case of the record company responding to demand. The Spanish cassette edition of "Kraftwerk 2" comes in a 2-panel J-card, with the iconic traffic cone on the front (but in green, unlike the debut, which I posted before ) and with the right panel crediting Florian Schneider-Esleben in full (he stopped using "Esleben" years before). There's a catalogue number for the LP, too, I suppose to facilitate placing an order for it in your local shop, ...

  THE MIX (Germany, 1991) EMI 1C 268-7 96650 4 Back to the homeland again, and a German edition! Kraftwerk's 1991 album of re-recordings, The Mix, came in several variants in Germany, some nearly identical, so to present the release here, I'm displaying two cassette variants, that came in the same J-card. Initially, I put "(Deutsche Version)" in the headline, since this is the German-language edition. However it doesn't actually say so on the front - unlike the previous release, Electric Cafe, which had "Deutsche Version" on the German-language editions. The Mix (English Version) did have the additional print on the front though, so they're still quite easy to distinguish I suppose.  By 1991, I think cassettes were generally better than ever, both in terms of sound. Sound-wise, we got such features as XDR sound, Dolby B,  even new metal tape substituting the earlier spools, and also the clear shells, which allowed the J-cards to give a better prese...

  THE ROBOTS (UK, 1991) EMI, TCEM 192 Cassette single time! I love the cassette singles, they often serve as a counterpart to the albums, with different artwork and remixes... and in 1991, cassette singles even had a different packaging standard to the full-length cassettes, coming in cardboard sleeves. Cassette singles were quite the thing in 1991, and in addition to the UK, Kraftwerk had cassette singles out in France and the US. (More of that another time.) The Robots was the first single off "The Mix" , and the UK editions had a slightly different design to other places, with a red logo for the title. It was replaced with the standard b/w logo on vinyl and CD, but the cassette only came with this red logo. One wonders whether sales were up to expectations. It's a nice item though, the cover is a full cardboard sleeve, with openings at the top and bottom to slide the cassette out. The spine sides are different, with one repeating the title logo and the band name while...

  RADIO-ACTIVITY (Spain, 1985?)  Capitol/ EMI/ Fama 256 1820874 These endless lists of record companies confuse me, but as is clearly shown in the images below, this "Fama" reissue is another release where you can just smell the record company red tape... How it was possible that two big international labels had ownership of Kraftwerk's music I do not know, but it appears to have been fairly commonplace for bands to sign with different labels in different territories; maybe it is just some kind of legal spill-over? Whatever the reasoning behind it, many of Kraftwerk's releases bear both the EMI and Capitol logos, at least up to and including Computer World. Additionally, the mid-80s albums were reissued as part of the "Fame" series internationally, and in Spain, yes of course, the word Fame was translated into Spanish, so you get a big "FAMA" logo on the spine and front of the J-card.    On the front, the album cover is presented as a stylised, sim...

THE MAN·MACHINE (Italy, 1978) EMI/ Capitol 3C 246 85444 I suppose much of the attraction when it comes to collecting cassettes, is to see how various countries have solved the design issues, changing a big square LP cover into a tiny rectangular cassette... Within the given parameters, there's a lot of choices on how to present the album for different markets, and a lot of scope as to translations, variants and even mistakes! Italy's original cassette edition of The Man·Machine is, in my humble opinion, one of the most accomplished when it comes to design. I think it is simple yet effective: They've reprinted a facsimile of the LP, then simply used the "left-over" space (from square to rectangle) to put a gigantic band logo above the image! The band name is simply copied from the top left corner of the LP, and repeated horisontally across the top as large as possible, in white letters against a black background. Capitol's 70s standard for Italy was a blue spi...