Progressive Rock
Cooking Vinyl releases the fiftieth-anniversary editions of “Tales Of Mystery And Imagination Edgar Allan Poe”, the first Alan Parsons Project album, on 11 December. The record came out in 1976.
What is new in this batch is a Dolby Atmos mix Alan Parsons made in 2026 from the original multitrack masters. It sits on the Blu-ray alongside the 2016 5.1 mix, the HD remaster of the original album, the remaster of the 1987 revision and a disc of archive material titled “Work In Progress”.
There are four formats. The three-LP 180-gram set comes as a bookpack, numbered and limited to 1,976 copies with a certificate of authenticity; the three-CD set adds thirty-four bonus tracks, twelve of them previously unreleased, and a sixty-page book with lyrics, commentary and interviews; and there is a picture disc of the 1976 album with a twelve-inch insert carrying the original inner gatefold artwork. Miles Showell mastered the physical formats at Abbey Road Studios.
The album sets texts by Edgar Allan Poe to music and was signed by Parsons and Eric Woolfson. A version with the mix redone came out in 1987, and it goes on the three-LP set, the three-CD set and the Blu-ray; the picture disc carries only the 1976 album.
Text by Guillem Cardós