Kraftwerk cassettes

  THE MAN·MACHINE (Argentina, 1978) Capitol 18030 Argentina! A great place for Kraftwerk collectibles, for at least two reasons: First, they translate the track titles on the covers, meaning most releases look different in Argentina, and second, it seems like most releases came in many editions and variants. "La Maquina Humana" is a good case in point! I have posted another edition of this before, the one with the cat.no. 118030. I assume today's post was a reissue, simply because the window in the middle is very narrow, which I've only seen in early cassettes, and also the 118030 edition has paper labels. The J-card is practically the same for both of these editions; a simple 1-panel on thin, glossy card. The inside is pretty exactly the same, and on the outside, only the cat.no sets them apart - except the Capitol logo on the front of this edition misses the copyright info from the 118030 edition. The cassette itself is quite different though, this edition being he...

THE MAN·MACHINE (Argentina, 1978) Capitol 118030 One of my favourite places as far as Kraftwerk cassettes go, I've posted cassettes from Argentina before , but strangely not "La Maquina Humana", which came in so many variants in Argentina!  As I have said before, often there are variants of the catalogue numbers to Argentinian cassettes - in this case, the number 118030 is followed by a similar edition with 18030, and another version with different sleeve (which I hope to post about later!) has the cat.no 16128. Vinyl editions carry the cat. no 108030 and 8030; according to Discogs, the latter is a reissue. If true, this tells me that they were not released in numerical order - one might assume the 18030 came before 118030, but it could be the other way around as per the LPs. A further indication of this is that the 118030 edition comes with paper labels, whereas 18030 versions all have on-body print... Still, I'm only making assumptions here. It gets worse: On the la...

  AUTOBAHN (Argentina, 1985) EMI 18321 Here's another example of the 1985 reissue of Autobahn, albeit in a bit of a state... There seems to have been some sort of water damage, causing a brown discolouring to the edge of the J-card. I still think it's worth posting, being a rare Argentinian issue... The attraction of cassettes from Argentina (and also LPs, btw) is of course that they would translate the track listing to Spanish, a welcome change from the usual German or English titles. (Another attraction to European collectors is of course the simple fact that they are fairly hard to come by here!)  Apart from that, it's a pretty straightforward release - a 1-panel J-card, which features just a small part of the familiar landscape painting from Emil Schult. The VW Beetle is not on this edition at all! The Spanish-language title go across the sky of the painting itself, in white letters against the clouds... Not that easy to see what it says. Inside the J-card, the heavily-...

Computer World (1981, Argentina)  EMI 18954 Back to Argentina for this one, a somewhat battered copy of Computer World. I said in an earlier post ( here ) that there were all sorts of weird variants of the Argentinian releases, but on closer inspection, the supply seems to have dried up by the time of this release, as I've only ever come across this one Argentinian release for Computer World - for The Man Machine, there are two completely different J-cards designs, and for both that and its predecessor, Trans-Europe Express, there were a lot of different editions, with a multitude of catalogue numbers. Here, though - just the one. Well, as far as I know now. The front cover is lifted from the UK edition, with some local appendages - an extra EMI logo (in addition to the one on the spine), for some reason; the catalogue no. in large print; the word "CASSETTE". All surely correcting a fault of the UK original, even if it is unclear to me exactly which fault. I liked it bett...

  TRANS-EUROPE EXPRESS (Argentina, 1977) Capitol 118019 Argentina put out a range of absolutely fascinating cassettes by Kraftwerk in the 70s and 80s, and it is still an under-researched area, meaning that variants still pop up that haven't been documented online before, and fans may learn of new items all the time! For Trans-Europe Express, Argentina opted for a variant of the colour image sleeve - The original German cover had Maurice Seymour's black and white group photo on the front and J. Stara's montage on the back, but many countries used the J. Stara image on the front cover, and in full colour. The Argentinian vinyl replicates the J. Stara sleeve from the US, UK and some other territories, but the cassette uses a cropped version of the image, with a black frame on white background. Many different editions exist of this cassette, some with paper labels, some with on-body print, and the J-card comes with several different catalogue numbers. Apparently, the first cass...