Kraftwerk cassettes

THE MAN·MACHINE (Italy, 1978?) Unofficial - no label, no cat.no. I've posted the official Italian The Man·Machine cassette before, but Italy also had a flourishing un-official music industry in the 1970s... So here's one example of a bootleg copy from Italy. There were many different editions, and I suppose this pirate industry enabled some cottage industry-type limited editions, so of course they keep turning up, and no-one can tell how many copies there were made, or exactly when. I have two different Italian editions with no record company logos, or S.I.A.E stamps (more about those here ), this is the lesser-known one. It's funny too - the front cover is a replication of the official album, but the Dolby logo from the official cassette is simply crossed out with a big black box - in fact, blacker than the background colour used on the rest of the front cover. A rare case of honesty among the pirates - I expect the cassette is not recorded with Dolby then? Thanks for spa...

ELECTRIC CAFE (Hungary, 1986) EMI/ Gong MKL 37117 My supply of Electric Café cassettes is beginning to run out, I fear - but still a couple more to show, and of course, hopefully I'll find more soon! This one is from Hungary though, and interesting for its J-card insert, which presents the international standard design on the front, but then abandons every design feature for spine, back-flap and second panel, all of which are standard black on white, and most of the liner notes are gone compared to most international releases. The right-panel tracklist doesn't even divide between "Side A" and "Side B", simply listing the songs, with songwriter credits. Also, the lettering used is so large, the credits for each song doesn't fit on one line, giving the whole design a bit of a messy appearance. -Of course, for a collector that's exactly the charm; at least it's something unique, that makes this release stand out... Cassettes are grey with white pape...

V/A - Super Group Festival (Germany, 1974) Philips 69 978 Another Various artists compilation today, and again I feel it's justified by the Kraftwerk content - I trust this item should be interesting to even the most discerning Kraftwerk cassette enthusiast! As we know, Kraftwerk released precious little music that wasn't on their albums; their singles would generally an album track on each side, and they didn't contribute exclusive tracks to film soundtracks or compilation albums. 11 albums, some with language variations (5 albums in both German and English, two songs in French , two in Spanish and one in Japanese). Tour De France is a non-album single, or at least it was for 20 years - until they re-recorded it and used it to flesh out the 2003 album Tour De France Soundtracks.  So the only Kraftwerk recording that isn't on any of their albums is the early version of Kometenmelodie. Released as "Kohoutek-Kometenmelodie", this was a 1973 single, with one fast...

THE MIX (Australia, 1991) EMI 796671-4 The Mix, that 1991 collection of re-recordings of well-known songs that has served as one of the 8 albums in their "Der Katalog" concept, came long after the era of 'local design', and well into the era of multinational companies, so it's no surprise that most editions look like each other; and while I've tried to present some of those editions that deviate from the norm, we should not forget how this release was meant to look - so here's a - relatively speaking - "standard" issue! The Australian edition is similar to the US, European and UK versions in most aspects - it's a clear cassette with a sheet of foil inside, it comes with a 4-panel J-card including a full-panel backflap, bearing the same design with only minor details keeping them apart (cat.no and such - in fact, looking closer now I see this edition has the photos cropped tighter than US and German versions, but they're all the same pics ...

EXCELLER 8 (France, 1976) Vertigo, 7149 007 I haven't had a compilation cassette in a while, and when I mentioned Exceller 8 in a recent post , it dawned on me that I had never posted it here! So today I'm putting in a French edition of that seminal early works compilation. What has been said before though, is that the chart impact of Autobahn, especially in the US, paved the way for a whole bunch of compilations of their earlier product (as well as reissues of the previous album Ralf & Florian, but let's leave that for later!). I've written about a few of these before, but the single most famous one is Exceller 8, having been released as an LP and/or cassette in many countries all over the world. Apparently first compiled for the UK market, it was also released in France, Portugal, Israel, Canada, New Zealand and Australia (most places on LP only). The French cassette seems to have been put out after the LP, it is dated 1976, so it's possible that they made y...

  V/A - Tanz Mit Dem Herzen (Germany, 1982) EMI Electrola 1C 264-78 083 I haven't really featured Kraftwerk's appearances on various artists compilations on this blog before, nor am I sure I will make a habit of it... But I can think of a couple reasons to mention them, and therefore, here is an example! The reason I blog about Kraftwerk cassettes from around the world is fairly simple: Aside from the simple fact that I like cassettes and don't find them online much, in a more philosophical sense I think that they represent a sort of document of Kraftwerk's cultural impact - there are so many different versions of their output, across all continents, showing that people all around the world have listened to Kraftwerk... And of course, within that context, there must be lots and lots of people who only had one track on a compilation album? And anyway, some times a various artists release is the only way to get a single edit on cassette, as is the case with this one. Tanz...