Kraftwerk (Poland, 199?) Unofficial
TomZo 0090


The Polish takeover continues with another pirate cassette, today it's a compilation! Well, kind of.
 

I've touched before on the anything-goes attitude, typical in Poland in the late 80s and through the 90s. Today's item is a brilliant case in point; nearly a two-for-one, it has most of the The Man-Machine album on side one, and most of the Computerwelt album on side two. Yes, one in English, the other in German! 'Neon Lights' is omitted from the first, while Computerwelt is presented here without 'Taschenrechner' _and_ 'Nummern'. All three are key tracks, although I suppose nearly every track is key on these two releases... It's especially baffling that 'Nummern' is not included, since it's sort of a medley with the next song, 'Computerwelt 2', so this one starts rather abruptly after the ending of it's counterpart. In fact, the cassette is a c60, so it wasn't even necessary to leave Nummern off. Well, I've been surprised by Polish cassettes before!


The design is abolutely in kind with the tracklist, with a surprising jeans combo, looking like something that got someone fired from the design dept of some advertising company... The only words on the front are "TomZo" in the upper left corner, and "Kraftwerk" across the bottom of the image, no further hints to what album this might be until you open the case and view the track list inside. The backflap has a surprising amount of buzz words - "Compact cassette", ok, I thought as much, but why are these four countries mentioned? After this, some copyright info, where they seem to claim the right to broadcast the music publicly, at least, the buyer is not allowed to do so... Some famous brands of recordable cassettes, then my favourite morsel of info: "Recordered by TomZo". Even if "recordered" means something, which I doubt, I'm willing to bet this statement is false! Bah humbug. The neutrally clear cassette shell has labels of the same hot pink hue as the J-card, with the band name displayed on the A-side. This, as we have seen before, is more info than is displayed on many Polish cassettes, so thanks TomZo for that!








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