Kraftwerk cassettes

COMPUTER WORLD (Italy, 198?) Unofficial release Stereo Teen 355321 I haven't posted any Computer World cassettes in over one year, so it's about time! A recent purchase, this is an unofficial Italian edition of Computer World! This one may be from around the same time as the official edition , it has a strangely home-made appearance - labels glued "in the vicinity" of where they should be, and on the J-card a lot of fine lines, where you can clearly make out that they've assembled the cover from many little cut-and-pasted pieces... The front cover image is kind of a close-up, compared to the LP design, with the colours "inverted" - ie the background is black, while the computer (ok, the "terminal", then!) is dyed a greyish yellow. Although it's dark, you can still clearly make out the four silhouettes on the screen. The surroundings seem to be standard for this unofficial and beautifully named label, with the band name and album title in la...

Release 6 - the atlantic group 1994 (USA, Promotional sampler, 1994) Atlantic, no cat.no. It's my 200th post on this blog, so I should perhaps have dug out something awesome... But I don't know, I sort of think this blog is about the joy of collecting, in general, and not just about the most fascinating items. So that said, I want to post this, another promo compilation. I find them interesting, this one is in the same vein as a couple I have posted earlier. Like those previous ones, this cassette contains short snippets of tracks from 13 new releases, with a voice-over telling us how great each release is. This time, we are being treated to nearly two minutes of Elektric Music's TV, and the surprisingly thick American accent of the record company man who has this to say about it:  "Elektric Music: Esperanto. A sonic break-through from techno pioneers Karl Bartos of Kraftwerk and Lothar Manteuffel of Rheingold. An exciting and accessible new body of work, enigineer...

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...

THE MIX (Poland, 1991?) SuperTape ST 632 Oh, come on. It's been ages since I had any Polish pirate cassettes up, surely one more can't hurt! Poland has had such a _mass_ of different cassettes, especially of The Mix, which I've shown in loads of different editions here before . Most of them will have tampered with the tracklist somehow - again I'm at the risk of repeating myself - as the original album is 65 minutes long and the normal cassette length is either 46 or 60 minutes. Simpler and cheaper to use a shorter cassette and skip one track on the CD. The track they left out, however, is slightly surprising: The last track of the album, and the highlight of the 1991 tour (and of many tours since) - Music Non Stop. They haven't left the rest of the tracks in their correct place, either - Pocket Calculator and Dentaku are on different sides of the cassette, bringing a medley to a confusing end, and worse still - Abzug is on its own in the middle of side B, while ...

TRANS-EUROPE EXPRESS (Australia, 1980s) Capitol TC-MID-166109 Back to Australia again! From a Kraftwerk cassette collector's perspective they put out quite a lot of interesting releases - certainly more than I knew when I started collecting! Most cassettes from Australia - whether first-issue or re-release - come with nicely un-imaginative design; sometimes based on the UK cassette counterparts, sometimes just the LP front against a white background. This one, which I think is from 1987, falls into the latter category, and looks like you'd expect it to if you've seen the LP version with colour front (as released in Australia, and also UK, US, Japan, Sweden and others, I talked at some length about it in an earlier post ). There's no mistaking it for the first edition though, as the LP design is moved towards the middle of the front, with the band name above. It looks like this cassette is the counterpart to a 1987 mid-price reissue on LP, with the same catalogue nu...

THE MAN·MACHINE (Greece, RE 198x?) Capitol 14C 262-854444 Time for a Greek re-edition of The Man·Machine! I don't have that many Greek cassettes, but let's at least see the ones I have... It's been nearly a year since I presented the original ! The Man·Machine came in several variants in Greece, but the differences are pretty minor. EMI changed address at some point, so the address printed on the J-card is different on this than on the original, and this edition has on-body print instead of paper labels. (There is also another reissue which has green on-body print, which I hope to put up in a future post!) The J-card is still 2-panel, printed on one side only, and the design is almost the same as the first edition, except the contact details as mentioned. It's the details that make for a collection!

AUTOBAHN (1985, France) EMI/ Pathé Marconi 2400704 Another recent acquisition today, a French reissue of Autobahn. I had no idea this existed until I stumbled upon it - although that says more about me than about the item I suppose. As we've seen across this blog, most countries would put out different versions of an album, changing the label or J-card as the old ones sold out. The 1985 reissue of Autobahn was more like a full-scale reissue, sanctioned and remixed by the band, and with an updated version of Emil Schult's landscape painting on the front (without the VW dashboard from the 1975 original). While some cassette editions would crop the image, this one has the full LP image, facsimile-style on the front. Below, the band name in large red letters is more in keeping with other designs from the record label than with how Autobahn was presented everywhere else... , The lower inch or so of the sleeve is made up of logos, three record labels and two indicating loads of soun...