** Edition of 100 copies. Gold print on high-quality natural cardboard. 2021 Stock ** A collection of dreamy, ambient-folk songs composed in solitude by Maria Valentina Chirico. Her arrangements include tape loops and field recordings created by Andrea Penso (a frequent collaborator who was originally part of Canti Magnetici label and is now active as Invisibilia editions), the voice of her 11-year-old friend and collaborator, Marta Arbarello, and bass by Michele Anelli, a charismatic figure in the Italian underground improvised music scene. The music brings to mind afternoons spent between reality and fantasy by a child who gets lost in nature. The songs of Folk Tapes contain the same essence as dreams that come to one at dawn.

Side A suggests the soft images of the film "Picnic at Hanging Rock", while Side B is a musical fairy tale about a little girl who turns into a white donkey. At times the music imagines Nico falling in love with the harmonium during adolescence or Vashti Bunyan performing a soundtrack for an eastern European animated film. Folk Tapes is Chirico's official debut as a songwriter (she is a singer with a fruitful career in contemporary classical and sacred music). It anticipates the release of another short work that we hope will come out by the end of the year, a 7-inch EP composed of two songs: a reinterpretation of the traditional Neapolitan Christmas carol "Quanno Nascette Ninno", from which comes the most famous "From Starry Skies Thou Comest", and an original song inspired by a Rainer Maria Rilke poem.

Maria Valentina Chirico is a singer with a baroque, classical and contemporary music background. She graduated in vocal chamber music, studied in Berlin and Turin, and has performed in various theatres and festivals, expanding her repertoire of sacred and contemporary music. She founded Tubipora Musica, a duo based on original music, improvisation, ancient and modern repertoire for harp, vocals, harmonium and electronics. She has been in love with the sound of the harmonium since she was a child, and later started collecting ‘forgotten’ harmoniums from churches and older musicians. In 2018, on the night of St Nicholas, she received a handmade, portable Harmonium from Klaus Langer Harmoniumwerkstatt. Valentina has started composing her own music for theatre and cinema, and is now focused on writing music for fairy tales, and songs about animals, children, plants and dreams.