Kraftwerk cassettes

ELECTRIC CAFE (Poland, 1986?) MC M-194 Another Polish pirate edition today, and this time it's a version of Electric Cafe! I bought a pile of Polish cassettes recently, and had a few from before, so it's going to be a bunch of them from now on, although I'll try to mix in some other editions too. Today's one is interesting though - for the cover design! With the music exactly the same on every edition, obviously the design is a big part of the appeal when it comes to collecting. I've mentioned before that sometimes, the "best" ones from a design point of view are not necessarily the most interesting ones, and today's one is certainly more in the "WTF?!" end of the register! The original LP inner sleeve - also a page of the CD booklet - is cut in between two halves of the front cover. I expect it is another of those creative decisions on how to make a square LP/CD front translate to a rectangular cassette, but it's sort of baffling all the

AUTOBAHN (New Zealand, 1975) Vertigo 7149 005 New Zealand again! As seen before, I do love these NZ cassettes. A small market, far away, with many variants and generally nice-looking releases, I suppose, all of which add to the charm. I've posted the NZ reissue of Autobahn before, but here's the first edition. (In fact, I thought I'd posted this too, but I checked, nope, I haven't) In contrast to the Australian edition, one has here given the UK sleeve a miss, opting for the Emil Schult painting, as per the German original LP. The front panel has the LP cover below a big yellow Vertigo Swirl logo, and the band name and album title - and a Dolby logo - against a black background. The J-card folds out into a second panel, with the track list and some credits, including the cat.no for the LP (The NZ and UK LPs share the same cat.no, just like the cassettes). The spine gives the Price Code M, and the backflap has a slightly shorter tracklist - with "Kometenmelodie 1

KRAFTWERK 2 (Italy, 1977) Fontana, 7299 776 Following on from yesterdays post , of course I couldn't post "1" and not follow up with "2"! The two make up a set of the first four Kraftwerk albums, in edited versions - On the first, tracks from Kraftwerk's debut are coupled with songs off the third album, while on this, we get the tracks off the second album and their break-through, Autobahn. The A-side has the main portion of early highlight "Kling Klang" - pretty much the first 9 minutes. Then, we get some of Kraftwerk's most pointless work, "Atem" - three minutes of what sounds like heavy breathing - and Strom, which opens with a minute of someone's first rehearsal on electric guitar. In both cases, the songs are unaltered and not edited. The next track, Spule 4, is an ambient bass guitar jam, where it has been decided that around 90 seconds will suffice. I don't disagree. Wellenlänge is also cut down to under two minutes, an

KRAFTWERK 1 (Italy, 1977) Fontana, 7299 775 Most of the time, the casettes available on the second hand market are in pretty good condition. Occasionally, some optimistic dealer will try to get sold an item without cover, often listing the item at a higher price than the complete item normally sells for, but rarely have I seen a more battered copy of any cassette in my posession than todays item! It's pretty rare though so until I find a NM version I'm quite happy to own this! So here's an Italian cassette called "Kraftwerk 1". We've had a couple of compilations of early works before , and as I've said, there were a good range of different ones issued in various places in the wake of Kraftwerk's international successes (Autobahn, Radio-Activity was a hit in France, and the 1981 UK tour generated some interest and one more comp...). These compilations have been both an interesting addition to a completist's collection, for their track selection,

THE MAN·MACHINE/ RADIO-ACTIVITY (Saudi-Arabia? 1983?) Unofficial - Golden GL, GL 1328 Today's unofficial release was a bit of a mystery...Except I think I may have solved it! This cassette was recently sold on ebay, but the ad did not suggest any country of origin. The pictures showed the cover and the labels, but neither state any country (which is not uncommon among unofficial releases). Worse, the cassette is not listed in Discogs - and the label Golden GL is listed as "from unknown country "!  So what to do? Well, once I got it home, and started taking pictures of it, I thought it was kinda familiar, and it bears an uncanny resemblance to a previous post here , from the Saudi-Arabian '747' label; a C-60 cassette with The Man·Machine backed with selected tracks from Radio-Activity! Although the running order is changed, the same tracks were used, and there's several other similarities; typeface is the same, a couple of printer's errors ("Spacelas

THE MIX (Poland, 1991?) Top Music K-337 Plenty of Polish pirate cassettes to present, as I made contact with a Polish dealer recently. The Mix has been featured lots of times before , of course, but there are so many to choose from! In fact, to put a perspective on this, Discogs has documented a total of 52 cassettes of The Mix - of which 30 are Polish (although the number includes variants; still, a record-breaking 22 different editions on as many labels)! As with the Takt release I presented recently, the 65-minute double LP is cut down to a single album length. Here's 45 minutes of The Mix, again 8 of the 11 tracks. This time though, they've taken out Dentaku, Autobahn and Radioaktivität, making Trans-Europa Express (its three-part suite separated across the sides of the cassette) the "oldest" song here. I'm using the German titles, as they're the ones they've issued here. I suppose it was easier to travel to Germany and get a CD there, most Polish Th