Kraftwerk cassettes

TRANS-EUROPA EXPRESS (Poland, 1991?) Mateos  91159 So, another Polish pirate cassette today, but it's not The Mix this time! Poland, as indicated on this blog before, is the one country that has produced the highest number of different Kraftwerk cassettes. Polish copyright law, or possibly lack of law enforcement, made it easy to make a limited run of cassettes without contacting the legal owners, and there are dozens of different labels that have put out one or more Kraftwerk cassettes. Sometimes, it's just a version of one of the albums, other times it's something more elaborate, including "greatest hits" type compilations. Most releases will have some special design feature setting them apart from their competitors.  Another feature I have began to regard as typically Polish, is that they will often have tampered with the tracklist in one way ot another, mostly to bring the playing time down to standard length. Rather than present the buyer with one casette sid...

ELECTRIC CAFE (USA, 1986) Warner Brothers 9 25525-4 (4-25525) It struck me today that we've had USA editions of Electric Cafe on a couple of occasions, but never the standard stock copy, so that's what I'm doing today! Previously, we've had a Club edition , and a "title sleeve" promo , and we've also seen a v/a promotional item with a brief excerpt from the album with a voice-over. As mentioned before, by 1986, the cover design was mostly standardised, you got more or less the same J-cards the world over, and the US one is not much different from many others (click on the "Electric Cafe" tag  below to see others!). Not that I blame them for re-using the original design, either - it was a fairly decent package with three panels plus another full-panel backflap, with the 3-d design from New York Institute of Technology (which was pretty stunning for a pop record of that time!) in three different images. The cassette is clear with white on-body pr...