Kraftwerk cassettes

RADIO-ACTIVITY (USA, 1993) Capitol 4N-16380 I recently posted the US re-issue of Trans-Europe Expres s, here's a kind of counterpart for the preceding album. Although they look very similar, apparently they are years apart... Like that TEE one , this comes in a simple 1-panel J-card, printed on one side only. The legend "A Capitol Re-Issue" is printed on the front, not on the spine, but otherwise the layout is quite similar. The backflap has copyright info, barcode and "printed in USA", and the track list is only to be found on the front panel and on the labels themselves. For whatever reason, they have printed the spine in bright yellow, which is lightly faded on my copy, and some details on front and spine in red - possibly they felt the black LP cover needed some livening up.   The cassette also shares a few details of note with a Canadian reissue , which I also have posted here before: The cat.no is the same - it's not uncommon for US and Canadian cass...

Computer World (France, 1988) EMI/ Fame 1643704 Well, what do you know: As I prepare a new post, again it turns out there are multiple variants I don't know about. In this case, the French reissue of Computer World. The French reissues are easy to spot, as they are marked with "reedition" and the year of manufacture. In this case, on both sides of the J-card it says "reedition the 1988", so France decided on a reissue the year before Italy. How come? I expect I shall never know. I have a few reissues on the Fame label, and where the LPs would substitute the designed labels and inner sleeves with adverts for more reissues, the cassettes don't really have neither designed labels or inners, and so the difference will sometimes be a moot point... Sometimes, the Fame cassettes will reproduce the Fame LP cover (ie with the Fame logo on the facsimile), but on this, we get the original LP cover against a white background, and the Fame logo is in the top left corner...

ELECTRIC CAFE (Yugoslavia, 1986) EMI/ Jugoton CAEMI 9210 And we're back to Electric Cafe again. As said earlier, by 1986, releases were fairly standardised for many territories, notably within the EU, and it's getting harder to come up with variants that actually look different, but there are still a few interesting items worldwide that have not featured here yet! In Yugoslavia, Electric Cafe was put out on the State label, Jugoton, and compared to the mentioned "standard" of EU, UK, and the USA, this looks rather cheap and simple: a 1-panel J-card, printed on both sides. My copy (if not all) is cut a little to narrow and misses a little of the front cover on the right-hand side. (They should have looked to Italy and put the design in a frame.) The inside of the J-card holds the credits, impenetrable as they are, at least stylishly presented in what I believe is Kraftwerk's own typeface? In fact, the panel is lifted from the EU standard edition, so you get two of ...

  THE MAN·MACHINE (Argentina, 1978) Capitol 18030 Argentina! A great place for Kraftwerk collectibles, for at least two reasons: First, they translate the track titles on the covers, meaning most releases look different in Argentina, and second, it seems like most releases came in many editions and variants. "La Maquina Humana" is a good case in point! I have posted another edition of this before, the one with the cat.no. 118030. I assume today's post was a reissue, simply because the window in the middle is very narrow, which I've only seen in early cassettes, and also the 118030 edition has paper labels. The J-card is practically the same for both of these editions; a simple 1-panel on thin, glossy card. The inside is pretty exactly the same, and on the outside, only the cat.no sets them apart - except the Capitol logo on the front of this edition misses the copyright info from the 118030 edition. The cassette itself is quite different though, this edition being he...

TRANS-EUROPE EXPRESS (USA, 197?) Capitol 4N-16301 It feels a bit like I'm clearing out the hard-drive here, as yet another of my follow-up posts turn up right on the back of the last one... This time it's the second US edition of Trans-Europe Express - I've posted the first edition before. So anyway, as stated before, both editions come in a simple 1-panel J-card, printed on one side only, the first edition has the LP cover reprinted against a black background, while this is in white. Note the message on the spine: "A Capitol Re-Issue", saving us the effort of wondering about it. The cassette is grey with black print, and perhaps surprisingly, it has rectified the running order, where the first one had changed the tracks around (to make the programmes of each side as similar in length as possible). Here, the running order is as per the LP, which means you get four minutes of silence after the last vocoded "Endless..." on side 2. Well, to each life some...

RADIOACTIVITY (UK, 1991) EMI TCEM 201 2045524 Long time since we had a cassette single in here! And the supply is running out too, so unless I find one of those extremely elusive ones that haven't been featured before, it will be all albums on here henceforth. -But we shall hope for the best! Radioactivity came out in October 1991, a fair while after The Mix, which was released that June. The band were on tour though, doing some Scandinavian and German dates in October before continuing across Europe in November, so it made sense to have a new single in the shops I guess? It marks another landmark for Kraftwerk though, in that the single versions were all made by other people! Francois Kevorkian was involved in mixing both the Electric Cafe album and the single versions of The Telephone Call, which was four years or two singles ago at this point, and he has an agreeable tweak on this single version, which is the a-side of 7" and cassette singles. The b-side of the single was r...