…they write about us

None of the sounds heard in Edison Studio’s “live computer soundtrack” belongs to our common perceptions and this fits perfectly with the sound radicalism of a group of musicians operating in the 21st century, thus bypassing the philological problem and that of illustration. […] an interpretation, capable of going beyond the pseudo-genres of the false music / noise dualism to capture a new audio-visual essence.

(Sergio Miceli – Accademia Chigiana di Siena, in Edison Studio. Il silent film e l’elettronica in relazione intermediale, AA. VV, 2015)

The phenomena of association between the world of electronic music and cinema have almost always seen an automatic application, assigning predefined functions and meanings. The operation carried out by the Edison Studio seems to be aimed at exactly the opposite objectives […] Electronics represent the possibility of exploring new frontiers of signification by superimposing sound images. […] The work of the Edison Studio operates a patient action of surprise, each time procured by noise synchronization, only allusive elaborations, or real substitutions of sound events, which deceive the spectator from time to time and make the narration of the events absolutely personal.

(Marco Russo – Università degli Studi Trento , in Edison Studio. Il silent film e l’elettronica in relazione intermediale , AA. VV, 2015 )

There is a vintage soundtrack of the Battleship Potemkin […], but that of Edison Studio is a very different operation in terms, for the use of electronics and the choice of giving rhythm and color to the film, recreating its noises as well, the voices, the shots and the impulses. All this ends up confirming the compelling truth of Eizenstejn’s masterpiece.

(Stefano Valanzuolo, Il Mattino , 29 ottobre 2017)

Could one think of another soundtrack conceived according to the criteria and ideas that circulate in today’s “experimental” (multiform) music and that at the same time would create a soundtrack for much of the film? Edison Studio has accomplished the feat. They hired two Russian actors, captured their voices on texts taken from the original Russian captions, multiplied the computer voices for the choral scenes. Here is a real “new” Potemkin. The horrid sadistic commander of the ship is heard shouting his invectives and his orders to sentence the sailors to death who refuse to eat spoiled meat. Vakulinchuk, the sailor leading the mutiny, is heard cheering on his comrades. Vakulinchuk who ends up killed and, ashore, in front of the port of Odessa, is celebrated as the hero of the revolution. The steps of the firing squad (which will not fire) on the deck of the ship and of the Tsarist guards massacring the crowd on the staircase are heard as rhythm. Perhaps the purists will have something to say. But Edison Studio’s taste is perfect and the charm of this vision is overwhelming. And the music? The electroacoustics that exist beyond the sound effects of the actions performed in the film are very musical, top notch. Drums, electric guitar, double bass, balafon, metal plates and digital processing of recorded sounds. Splendid free percussive sequences, some glitchy reminiscences and incredible inventiveness in the frenetic “jagged continuum” of the scenes where the battle against the Tsarist fleet is prepared on the self-managed Potemkin.

(Mario Gamba, Il Manifesto – ALIAS , 13 gennaio 2018)

Connected to a purely collective art such as cinema, “eight-handed music!” by Edison Studio, different from improvisation and not even limited to the assembly of distinct parts, but extensively collective and continuously corrected in mutual comparison. […] To a “teamwork” enthusiast like the writer, this really appears, nowadays, to go against the trend. Just as the short circuit between the future (electronic experimentation) and the past (the restoration of origins) seems to cut out our asphyxiated and degraded present. […] It is really not a small thing, in an era of artistic products that stimulate the user only on an immediately emotional level.

(Francesco Muzzioli, L’Immaginazione , 23 ottobre 2018)

Illustration and hallucination, as it should be, pass one into the other in Edison’s work. Ambient sounds that constitute a sound texture not “above” the image, but in the image and for the image. They produce a volumetric dimension, without betraying or stunning the story, which is not only a search for the third dimension, but also touches the consistency of a sphere that incorporates the image as such: The screen as a support, the musical group “in the orchestra pit”, the listening as a cavea: in a word, the performance of the Rodolfi / Edison aesthetic circuit.

(Flavio De Bernardinis – Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia di Roma, in Edison Studio. Il silent film e l’elettronica in relazione intermediale , AA. VV, 2015)

It seems that Edison Studio’s relationship with cinema is developing under the banner of uniqueness, originality, unrepeatability. […] They are real “soundtracks” in the sense that the scores include not only the “organized sound”, but also the extra musical materials (those that could be reductively defined “sound effects”) and even the verbal materials generated by “imaginary” dialogues. However, the three different levels of sound processing seem to be regulated, upon listening, by a single starting “algorithm” or rather by a single compositional model.

(Guido Barbieri – Rai Radio Tre, in Edison Studio. Il silent film e l’elettronica in relazione intermediale , AA. VV, 2015)

The work […] manages to create an eternal waiting atmosphere by immersing the viewer in a grotesque and “disturbing” soundscape. Sounds and noises push the relationship that binds them to their respective visuals to the limit, often making a mockery of their potential referential function. […] intelligent is the choice of making speech distorted and incomprehensible, highlighting the impossibility of recovering a lost language, a world of voices trapped forever in a strip of celluloid.

(Anna Rispoli, President of the Jury of Hk5 rimusicazioni film Festival – Bolzano)

The result is surprising: a fusion of artificial sounds, dry noise, deformation of the human voice (creatively overturning its absence from silent cinema), sampling of musical fragments, dreamlike reinventions […] And it was truly a beautiful and original way to rediscover a masterpiece. Great success.

(Elisabetta Torselli, giornaledellamusica.it , 2014)

Pompeii and its streets come to life and revive with sounds, the electronic murmur, the gurgling buzz that from the Edison computers gives reality back to the film. Voices without words, sounds for the emotions of each character, watery gurgling for a love potion that is actually poisonous, the drama and comedy, even involuntary, of swamped and greasy actors who in peplos relive a cardboard Pompeii, full of swooning women and neoclassical and art pompière scenes. The witch who lives on Vesuvius reminds us for a moment Amelia (the witch who bewitches) and the arenas and the gladiators resound with the victory of the Rome championship, trumpets included. It is an enchanting job, this of sounding a film giving soul to dead things and sound to what cannot be dubbed or commented on, a brilliant idea. The blind Nidia, who crosses the swinging scene, like a sleepwalker or a mummy, her eye reversed, the uncertain course, strikes Ida and scares her. No one has any suspicion of the eruption, even here, until it occurs. And when the smoke rises and everything burns to, Nidia rescues the man she loves, but who must yield to another, and lets them escape in the ship (here it is, the salvation for the waters that in reality there was: but Bulwer Lytton did not know that eighty years later the skeletons of refugees in the port of Herculaneum would be found, the teeth exploded by the heat, the blood boiled, souls that would never leave) while she, a romantic heroine, commits suicide in sea. […].

(Antonella Cilento, Il Mattino, agosto 2006)

[…] the resonance of the materials of the objects featured in some historical shots [of the Battleship Potemkin] […] the echo of metals from the gears […] and on the famous Odessa staircase a rain of sounds interspersed with silences that have shown even to the less attentive how music is not made only by sound […]

(A. Benvenuto, www.exibart.com , 1 novembre 2017)

… The result was a very suggestive work, with an amplification of the dramatic effects and a skilful mixture of sounds that supported the scene and other abstract ones in synergy with the expressive setting. All this to underline the dramaturgically theatrical character of the filmic work. A reinterpretation … which made “Dr. Caligari’s cabinet” something else, at the same time updating its violent unreal content, furious with time.

(Aldo Mattina il Giornale di Sicilia , 3 ottobre 2004) […]

On the contrary, it seems to us that it is no longer possible to fully view the work without this “soundtrack” made us listen to by the four members of Edison Studio … giving life to an overall work that is as complex as it is successful, if only for the its immediate perceptibility, which gives further “sprint” to a masterpiece that does not belong to an archeology for insiders, but miraculously lives in a wholeness of actuality …. ”

(Niny Ganguzza La Sicilia , 4 ottobre 2004)

“A visually stunning film with powerful expressionist imagery, the music composed and performed by Luigi Ceccarelli, Fabio Cifariello Ciardi, Alessandro Cipriani and Mauro Cardi provided a compelling accompaniment to this silent classic. Richly layered and aggressively beautiful, this is truly a marvelous and masterly piece of work”.

(David Kim – Boyle, Computer Music Journal , 2004, MIT Press)