Kraftwerk cassettes

COMPUTER WORLD (Japan, 1981) EMI ZR28-613, EMS-91030 I've been looking forward to posting this, my first Japanese Kraftwerk cassette! As you can see, here's Computer World! Music fans all over the world love Japanese releases. Whether it's vinyl records, CDs or cassettes, Japan has had a history of going the extra mile with their physical product. Extras like bonus tracks, picture inserts, stickers, lyric sheets and OBIs are commonplace, and cassettes typically came with a long text insert inside, and a glorious outer slipcase! My pictures hardly do the item justice. The slipcase makes the front a little larger, and the Japanese text adds to the beauty of the front. On the back of the slipcase, the tracklist in both English and Japanese, and if Google translate is to be trusted, a short blurb about the album. Inside the slipcase is a standard cassette case, with a 4-panel insert. Here we get a Kraftwerk time-line on one side, and on the other: The lyrics, or more exactly s...

EXCELLER 8 (UK, 1975) Vertigo, 7149 007 I suppose I'm a sucker for the oddities and obscurities and variants, so if there's a choice between a cassette I expect a lot of people would be familiar with, and a barely different variant, I go for what I expect to be the more obscure. Today's post is kind of the "standard edition" of this compilation, I suppose - I've posted other editions of Exceller 8, but I think it originates from the UK, and I've never posted that, so - well, here's the UK edition! Exceller 8 is perhaps the most well-known compilation of their early works? It was released in 1975, after Autobahn had surprised the record company by soaring up the singles charts and basically creating a market for more Kraftwerk product. The 7" edition released in the UK was different to the German one, whereas the US would use the German single version, so when this compilation has that UK 7" edit, it leads me to believe the whole compilatio...

COMPUTER WORLD/ LANDSCAPE - FROM THE TEA-ROOMS OF MARS... (Saudi-Arabia, 1981?) Unofficial - 747, 6839 Another unofficial release from Saudi-Arabia today, and it's a split cassette! I've had one item from the Saudi '747' label before, a C-60 with one-and-a-half Kraftwerk album. In this instance, it's another C-60, with 30 minutes of Computer World followed by a different artist altogether! Landscape were originally a jazz funk outfit, but hopped the New Romantic bandwagon and made  a couple albums of synth pop, of sorts. Anyway, on the B-side here, you get 7 of the 11 tracks that make up the album "From The Tea-Rooms Of Mars .... To The Hell-Holes Of Uranus". The J-card is a hi-quality glossy 2-panel card, printed on one side. Again, as was the case with the previous cassette on the 747 label, the front cover has a unique design, a rather clever merging of the Landscape album cover with a re-assembling of the heads of the Kraftwerk dummies, as seen on t...

THE MIX (USA, 1991) Promo Elektra 60869-4 Here's a US edition of The Mix, which is a bit different. It's The Mix, in a promotional edition known as a "title sleeve" version. The "title sleeve" promo is normally a grey or white simple design with track list on the front, instead of the standard picture design used on the corresponding commercial releases. It looks like it's been fairly common for record companies to send out these sort of promos before the normal versions were ready, or maybe they are sent out to recepients who need not concern themselves with the picture covers? Ie. if these were sent out to enigineers to check if they sounded right, or radio stations where they might appreciate an edition in neutral sleeve to give the impression that the music speaks for itself... So as I say, you can find similar promo items from the late 80s and up through the nineties, and I suppose they are related to the more recent CD-R promos, which typically c...

THE MAN·MACHINE (India, 1995?) HMV/ Capitol STCS 890103/ SW 11728 This just in: Here is another Indian re-edition of The Man·Machine, the first cassette I've shown here which comes in an outsize "snap pack".  These snap packs seem to have been fairly commonplace in India in the mid-90s, and it's easy to see the attraction: The plastic used here is not as brittle as normal jewel cases, and less prone to crack and get broken; furthermore, the box is slightly bigger, so the design is more prominent in shops I suppose? Nicer. The card has a spine twice the normal breadth, and instead of the back flap we get a full-size back cover with tracklist and credits. The card is only printed on one side. Labels are clear with white print. As said earlier , India is home to a large amount of different variants of each Kraftwerk cassette, both because they are dated - as mentioned in this previous post on Indian releases - and the price would also normally be stated on the release....

THE MAN·MACHINE (Poland, 198?) Starling S114 Time for boots, here's another unofficial edition from Poland - this time, it's The Man-Machine! To my shock, I see I haven't had any Starling cassettes yet. I did touch upon the pirate cassette scene in Poland before though, and Starling was one of the more prolific companies there, with hundreds of releases to choose from... I think they were active from the mid-80s sometime and well into this millenium, and there were several Kraftwerk cassettes and variants as well. Today's edition is one of the many editions of The Man-Machine. Or I should say Die Mensch-Maschine, as the song titles on the cover are in German, although the title is in English... It plays the German version though, many Polish Kraftwerk cassettes have German-language contents . Well, they are neighbours, sharing 500 km of border. What drew me to this cassette is of course the cover. The 2-panel J-card has a unique design, a weird take on the El Lissitzky...

ELECTRIC CAFE (US Promo, 1986) Warner Bros. Records WB-25525 Today's edition of Electric Cafe is interesting; a promotional copy without artwork - the black-on-white cover has just the song titles and a bit of additional information. I've seen this one included in a promotional "press pack", distributed to press contacts, important record stores and record company executives to promote the new Kraftwerk release. This would include an info sheet, promotional photograph and the famous "mobile"; a card cut-out of the four robot heads to hang from the ceiling. Anyway, in addition to these press packs, I suppose the cassette must also have been circulated on its own, as it appears for sale more frequently than the other promotional stuff. It's of particular interest to me that the album title is not printed on the J-card nor on the labels. Famously, the album started its life in 1983, as "Techno Pop", the title they changed back to since the 2009 re...

THE MAN·MACHINE (Belgium, 1978) EMI/ Capitol 4C 256 85444 I was really happy to get this cassette - the Belgian edition! It's both quite rare from a collector's perspective, and of course it has its own solution to the problem of designing a rectangular front cover. Of course, there are many different versions of The Man·Machine on cassette, and while the original, iconic LP cover was pretty quadratic, if you print this on the front of a cassette cover, you get a lot of empty space on the top and/or bottom of the front panel. (I can only remember one country cropping the image to make it fit: Germany ) Some countries would fill this space with band name, album title, track list, and/or logos from the various record companies, or add background colour; Belgium actually took some design from the back cover of the LP, and pasted it across the top of the panel! They took the whole top left corner of the LP, with the band name and album title, and a black and white background. On t...

ELECTRIC CAFE (Spain, 1986) EMI 274 24 0644 4 So, the last post of 2022; here's the Spanish standard edition of Electric Cafe. This was the first version to come out on cassette in Spain, bearing the standard international version of the album, as issued in most countries - the one with the subtitle "English Version" in some countries. (-of course, this subtitle is wildly inaccurate, the lyrics coming in French, Spanish and English, but at least the title helps distinguishing between the "Deutsche Version" and this). Electric Cafe came in two different variants on cassette in Spain (in addition of course to the highly collectible Edicion Espagnola which I featured a while back). This one has yellow paper labels, and there's another with black on-body print on the cream-coloured cassette. I think they both came in the same J-card, though; a small 1-panel card printed on both sides. The spine and backflap are blue, as was known to happen with Spanish cassette...

THE MAN·MACHINE/ RADIO-ACTIVITY (Saudi-Arabia, 1981?) Unofficial - 747, 7724 Another day another unofficial release... From Saudi-Arabia! The '747' label is a fairly prolific label, putting out lots of different releases of Western pop music of different kinds. They put out a fair bit of Kraftwerk, but the thing that makes it a little more interesting is, that instead of releasing the albums as they were, they have re-assembled the tracks. In the case of this one, it's a C-60 cassette with the 35 minutes that are The Man·Machine, followed by selected tracks from Radio-Activity! Four tracks are left off: Airwaves, Radio Stars, Uranium and Transistor. Transistor was released on another cassette in Saudi-Arabia though, it's a bonus track on the label's issue of Trans-Europe Express (I will feature that one some other time, it's also rather interesting!). The J-card is a hi-quality glossy 2-panel card. It is printed on both sides, but the inside is just a list of o...