Kraftwerk cassettes

LA DÜSSELDORF: INDIVIDUELLOS (Germany, 1980) Teldec, 4.24524 CR Branching out a little further in 2026, here's another cassette that isn't strictly speaking by Kraftwerk. We've had some "Related artists" before though, so it feels logical to follow that trail a bit further. Klaus Dinger played drums on Side 2 of the first Kraftwerk LP, and stayed on as a member for nearly a year. Florian Schneider, Michael Rother and Dinger started work on the second Kraftwerk album, but sessions were aborted, Hütter returned and Rother and Dinger formed Neu!. The duo put out three brilliant albums, before personal relations had soured beyond repair and the band was no more. Rother went solo, and Dinger started La Düsseldorf, recruiting his brother Thomas Dinger and Hans Lampe. From 1976-1980, three albums were released, before relations again were so strained that they could not work together any more. One gets the impression that Klaus Dinger may have been difficult to work with...

KARL BARTOS: Communication (2003, Japan) Sony, no cat.no Ending the year with something different, here's a relatively new one - from 2003. Karl Bartos' solo album "Communication" was of course not released on cassette, because cassettes were not needed in most countries where it was released, but they made a promo cassette for Japan, and - well, this is that! The cassette has a November 2003 release date; of course, this promo could be made a few weeks before, but I think Kraftwerk's Tour De France Soundtracks came in August. Musically, it nods back to the sound of Elektric Music's "Esperanto" album, pretty much in the same vein as the music he wrote for Kraftwerk, and some familiar synth sounds, percussion and computer voices. The promo cassette includes the two remixes that were also bonus tracks on the Japanese CD edition (in fact, European CD-rom editions of the album had a download link to get the remixes, but they were not on the physical CD)....