THE MAN·MACHINE (Poland, 198?)
Starling S114


Time for boots, here's another unofficial edition from Poland - this time, it's The Man-Machine!

To my shock, I see I haven't had any Starling cassettes yet. I did touch upon the pirate cassette scene in Poland before though, and Starling was one of the more prolific companies there, with hundreds of releases to choose from... I think they were active from the mid-80s sometime and well into this millenium, and there were several Kraftwerk cassettes and variants as well.


Today's edition is one of the many editions of The Man-Machine. Or I should say Die Mensch-Maschine, as the song titles on the cover are in German, although the title is in English... It plays the German version though, many Polish Kraftwerk cassettes have German-language contents. Well, they are neighbours, sharing 500 km of border.


What drew me to this cassette is of course the cover. The 2-panel J-card has a unique design, a weird take on the El Lissitzky influence of the original. The band are shown in silhouettes, a likeness of the picture from the inner sleeve of the LP but reproduced with blackened faces and red lipstick - and the background has what I expect is a representation of the Trans-Europe Express? The title is tucked into the couple of small spaces left, and the band name is lifted from the LP (but inverted to black on white). The right panel has the tracklist, and a fascinating misunderstanding of the credits... The backflap shows, somewhat bizarrely, a bit of copyright info. God forbid you would make a copy of this cassette... The cassette gives no hints to the contents of this release, only the logo of the label and a promise that the cassette came from BASF.








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