Kraftwerk cassettes

ELECTRIC CAFE (Romania, 19?) Unofficial Poker 443 Another pirate edition today, but this time it's a country that hasn't featured here before: Romania! Here's a Romanian cassette of Electric Cafe. Admittedly it looks a lot like a similar release from Poland; I'm not sure whether Poker Sound was an actual label, with a Romanian office or - if this is a "bootleg of a bootleg"... Apart from the country of origin, today's cassette is fairly straightforward - the J-card has the LP design centre front, against a blue background, and band name and album title in coloured boxes over and under the image. There is a Polish edition of this, and the J-card for that looks exactly the same as this. The J-card is on glossy, thin paper, printed on one side, but with a stamp on the white inside (the significance of which is sadly lost on me). The track list both on the back-flap and the second panel is amended to make the sides of similar length.   The cassette has a ...

The Model (Poland, 199?) Unofficial Euro Star ES 2213 Time for another Polish pirate cassette! This time, though, a compilation, one of the few that weren't "curated", so to speak, in Poland...  "The Model 1975-1978" was a compilation on the US Cleopatra label, released in 1992. It features tracks from Radio-Activity, Trans-Europe Express and The Man Machine, some of them in their original single edits, and Les Mannequins which had been issued as the b-side to its English-language counterpart Showroom Dummies on a promotional "disco" 12" single. There are several Polish editions of this, this one has all the tracks from the compilation - not in the same order, though, they have been jumbled around, I suppose it was an effort to make two programmes of equal lenght. Apart from starting the cassette with the title track, which is not unjustified for a best-of compilation with a title track, they somewhat surprisingly placed Trans-Europe Express on Si...

TRANS-EUROPE EXPRESS (Canada, 198?) Capitol 4N-16301 Sometimes, writing about these cassettes makes me revisit previous posts. This time, here's the Canadian re-edition of Trans-Europe Express, which made me check a few others... Most Canadian cassettes come in a simple 1-panel J-card, printed on one side only, and this one is no exception. The backflap has the legal info, and a note that says "Previously released as 4XW-11603", setting it apart from the first edition. The cassette is black with grey print.   As an aside, the reason I checked previous posts was that I noticed the Dolby logo has "HX PRO" printed on it, and I have forgotten when that was introduced. One source on the www claims that Dolby HX Pro - sometimes only known as Dolby HX, an acronym for Headroom eXtension - was introduced in the early 1980s, so if that is correct, this cassette is not from the '70s. It shares label design with the mid-80s re-issue of Radio-Activity , too, so it sta...