An odd little item this, from Elektric Music – Karl Bartos’ initial post-Kraftwerk creative outlet, along with former Rheingold member, Lothar Manteuffel. 1993 saw the release of their debut album; ‘Esperanto’ and ‘TV’ was a highy catchy single released prior the album. In their native Germany, it came on 12″, 12″ picture disc, very limited promo-only 10″, CD single and this mini-disc edition. The mini-disc being somewhat desirable because in addition to the standard ‘TV’ track it also contained the longer re-take that is ‘TV 2’ in digital format – all other formats for ‘TV 2’ were vinyl – for whatever reason, it never appeared on the CD single variants – they instead had another take on the track, ‘Television’. As well as these two versions of ‘TV’, the mini-disc also contained two tracks from Elektric Music’s first single, ‘Crosstalk’, released in Germany at the tail end of the previous year. (‘Intercomix’ being a variant of ‘Crosstalk’ itself.)
Tracklisting;
- ‘TV’ (4.04)
- ‘TV 2’ (5.40)
- ‘Crosstalk’ (5.55)
- ‘Intercomix’ (4.08)
In the UK, 12″ and CD single editions mirrored those of the German editions, but there was also a 7″ edition of the single too, same tracks as per the CD single. Sadly, it failed to do anything in the charts, which was a shame given how commercial a track it was.
Knock me over with a feather! I was very diligent on getting all three of those SPV CD singles and the SPV Digipak of “Esperanto” back in the day. :Esperanto” was one of my last “favorite albums of the year” for a long stretch! But I had no idea about the existence of “TV2!” Least of all, this mini-disc of it! Minidisc was an attractive format for about 12 months, but the looming arrival of affordable CD-R, coupled with the lossy ATRAC compression that Sony favored, conspired to make the Minidisc a non-starter with me. By 1993, my company had an early CD writer and who cared about another flawed, proprietary Sony format? But I do care about Elektric Music! I will need to buy the “TV” 12″ to get “TV2!” Thanks a lot for sharing this.
It’s a really good version, highly recommended – now that I’ve dug it out of storage, I’m going to track down a minidisc player and transfer it if I can. It is the one and only minidisc I have ever owned!
I want to hear “TV2” too! I just found out about this today and didn’t know about it. I think CAMOUFLAGE had a MiniDisc too for “Bad News” with about 12+ versions on it, but i”m not sure. my copy was on DAT and I do not know how I acquired it! Luckily Spice Crackers was reissued and alot of those (kinda mediocre) mixes came out eventually.