THE MAN·MACHINE (Argentina, 1978)
Capitol 118030


One of my favourite places as far as Kraftwerk cassettes go, I've posted cassettes from Argentina before, but strangely not "La Maquina Humana", which came in so many variants in Argentina!

 As I have said before, often there are variants of the catalogue numbers to Argentinian cassettes - in this case, the number 118030 is followed by a similar edition with 18030, and another version with different sleeve (which I hope to post about later!) has the cat.no 16128. Vinyl editions carry the cat. no 108030 and 8030; according to Discogs, the latter is a reissue. If true, this tells me that they were not released in numerical order - one might assume the 18030 came before 118030, but it could be the other way around as per the LPs. A further indication of this is that the 118030 edition comes with paper labels, whereas 18030 versions all have on-body print... Still, I'm only making assumptions here.


It gets worse: On the label of this cassette, there's another cat.no for the LP - it says "Del LP-38030". I can't find any information online about a 38030 version of the album, maybe something will materialise in the future. Furthermore, the cassette label also issues a variant of the more common cat.no from the US and other versions of the LP; "Marca Reg. SW1-11728". The UK LP was ST-11728 and the US one SW-11728. Many territories would use one of these cat.no's for their own releases, but the SW1 variant I find only on this Argentinian cassette.


The J-card is a simple 1-panel on thin, glossy card, and the text relies on translations of the titles; even on the LP cover illustration, where the English title has been erased! (The Argentinian LP has an attractive translation in its place; on the cassette there's simply a bit more red background space above the band image. Looks a bit weird.). The inside of the J-card carries the tracklist with "English subtitles", alongside some of the credits and copyright notices, and again, variants abound: This copy has the usual black-on-white colours, but there are blue-on-white versions online, and I've seen even brown print. Apparently, it's not going to be easy to achieve a complete collection of Kraftwerk cassettes from Argentina!







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