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 spine and backflap, housed in a matching blue case. There is a version where the cassette itself has a blue shell, but this one is a greyish white. 

The J-card is a full 2-panel fold-out, with print just on one side, and the spine has that all-important SIAE stamp. The cassette has dark grey on-body print. Both Capitol and EMI logos here, which I suppose was quite the norm at that time.







Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Image
ELECTRIC CAFE (Australia, 1986) EMI TCEMD1001 Back to Australia, and one I've been looking for without much luck, the Straya edition of Electric Cafe! On a personal note, I ordered a copy of this during the pandemic, but it has yet to materialise... A rare occasion of things getting lost in the mail for me. Hope it's not going to happen more often in the future! For me as a collector, with many different editions of each release, the ones that look a bit different are often the ones I find the most interesting - even when they don't look that fascinating per se. I've shown a few editions of this release from countries that didn't splash out on the full , 2-sided/ 4-panel J-card, some countries made a relatively "budget" release on cassette... Australia did an interesting variant, where they steered clear of the all-black custom design, but at least, the J-card was printed on both sides. And the inside is simply an image, the one which was on the inner cove
Read more
Image
Kraftwerk (Poland, 199?) Unofficial TomZo 0090 The Polish takeover continues with another pirate cassette, today it's a compilation! Well, kind of.   I've touched before on the anything-goes attitude, typical in Poland in the late 80s and through the 90s. Today's item is a brilliant case in point; nearly a two-for-one, it has most of the The Man-Machine album on side one, and most of the Computerwelt album on side two. Yes, one in English, the other in German! 'Neon Lights' is omitted from the first, while Computerwelt is presented here without 'Taschenrechner' _and_ 'Nummern'. All three are key tracks, although I suppose nearly every track is key on these two releases... It's especially baffling that 'Nummern' is not included, since it's sort of a medley with the next song, 'Computerwelt 2', so this one starts rather abruptly after the ending of it's counterpart. In fact, the cassette is a c60, so it wasn't even neces
Read more
Image
RADIO-ACTIVITY (Canada, 1986?) Capitol, 4N-16380 Another Canadian issue, another sound improvement scheme; this time, the Dolby HX Pro... The system works, in short; it's a system to ensure less distortion, even at high input - which again means you can record the cassettes at a louder volume, thereby making the music rise out of the hiss and bob's yer uncle. A good idea around the advent of the CD, I suppose? For me though, a better selling point of the Canadian cassette reissue is the cover design; the album cover is presented against a grey background, with the band name and album title repeated in blue. It's both a quite stylish effect, and a welcome change from other international editions, where - if they didn't amend the LP cover to make it fit the cassette front, the background would simply be white, or at a push, black. (It's a bit sad that no other country based their cover design on the German cassette !) So. Being a mid-80s reissue from Canada, it's
Read more