Founded and steered by pianist-composer Francesca Badalini, I Sincopatici have occupied a peculiar niche in the Italian musical landscape: the live re-scoring and modernisation of silent cinema from the first decade of the twentieth century, a practice they have sustained in continuous collaboration with Milano’s Cineteca Italiana since 1999. Their second full-length record, “La Corazzata Potëmkin,” issued on January 9, 2026, arrives precisely two years after the ensemble’s debut “Decimo Cerchio (L’Inferno 1911 O.S.T.)” (2024), a project realised alongside vocalist/performer Claudio Milano. Between the two statements, the group’s sonic identity has shifted in a decisive direction. The debut’s collaborative, vocalist-anchored framework has been replaced by a new configuration: alongside Badalini (piano, electric guitars) and bassist Andrea Grumelli (fretless bass, soundscapes, electronics) now enter Silvia Maffeis on violin and Teo Ravelli on drums and live electronics—a quartet whose timbral palette spans the hushed intimacy of a Chamber string quartet to the full-throttle distortion of a Progressive Rock rig. The project’s brief is deceptively simple in its ambition: to compose an original “re-music” score marking the centenary of Sergei Eisenstein‘s 1925 masterwork, Battleship Potemkin. The music will accompany a specially prepared version of the film whose images have been recolorised through artificial-intelligence processes, lending the century-old photograms a chromatic vitality that the original monochrome never possessed. Yet the score is no mere period pastiche. I Sincopatici position the work squarely in the crosscurrents of RIO and Avant-Prog, folding in contemporary Progressive Rock, Avant-Garde Chamber practice, neoclassical gestures, Post-Rock architecture, and ambient-electronic texture. The resulting sound-world is one of perpetual negotiation: the acoustic gravity of piano and violin is perpetually in dialogue with the jagged interruptions of electric guitar, fretless bass, and synthesised washes, a tension that the album never resolves into easy synthesis, preferring instead to let the polarities coexist in productive friction. The opening movement “Uomini E Vermi” mirrors the film’s first act, the crew’s revolt against the ship’s putrid provisions, and it announces its thesis immediately: a brittle, austere soundscape draped in an ambient haze of genuine claustrophobia. An elastic, almost sinuous bass line and the slow, meditative weight of piano chords introduce the listener to the vessel’s interior, a space of compressed air and suppressed rage. The violin and percussion enter not as a resolution but as a mechanical awakening: the slow, grinding startup of a battleship’s engines made audible. The piano voices despondency and mounting tension in its phrasing, while Badalini‘s guitar cuts through with rough, distorted riffs that interweave with gurgling synth textures evoking the turn of propeller blades and the stultified resentment of men packed below deck. The track’s economy of means, nearly six minutes of sustained, low-level pressure, sets the tonal contract for what follows. If the first movement is the rumble of suppressed force, “Dramma Sul Ponte” is its detonation. Scoring the mutiny and the seizure of the command deck, the piece plunges into sustained dissonance and a controlled chaos that veers into genuine Avant-Garde improvisation. Maffeis‘ violin bites at the upper register with an acuity that reads as acute physical anguish, Badalini‘s piano hammers short, percussive clusters, discrete drops of sound that land with the finality of blood on the quarterdeck, while Ravelli‘s cymbal work and percussive strokes drive the structure forward with an almost violent insistence. The dynamic architecture of the track oscillates between sparse, ECM-inflected Chamber passages of near-silence and eruptions of full-band electric aggression, each extreme heightening the other. At nearly ten minutes, it is the album’s most structurally restless movement, and its refusal to settle into a single register mirrors the political instability of the scene it accompanies. The third chapter of the film, “Il Morto Chiama,” the mourning of Vakulenko and the city of Odessa‘s rallying solidarity around the fallen sailor’s body, finds here a musical counterpart of genuine elegiac weight. Badalini‘s electric guitar emerges with a clean, bell-like timbre whose harmonic phrasing carries an unmistakably Floydian lineage, yet it is filtered through a context that feels more elegiac than anthemic. Dark keyboard pads and the resigned, drawn-out lines of Maffeis‘ violin form a slow dialogue, suspended above a crushing electronic carpet that presses down like water over a sunken hull. A single, muffled tone, the sound of an anchor dropping to the seabed, anchors the passage in physical, almost liturgical solemnity. The piano, percussive and deliberate, sustains the equilibrium between grief and the stubborn persistence of a revolutionary ideal: neither consolation nor triumph, but the work of carrying a loss forward. The film’s most iconic sequence, the Tsarist troops’ massacre on the Odessa steps, does not open, as one might expect, with violence. “La Scalinata Di Odessa” begins almost pastorally: elegant, unhurried piano chords and the liquid ornamentation of Grumelli‘s fretless bass sketch a stillness that feels, in retrospect, like the held breath before a scream. That stillness is short-lived. The track erupts into a maelstrom of sustained fury in which the piano assumes the role of a martial, driving engine, Ravelli‘s drumming accelerates into a state of genuine ferver, and the violin stretches into epic, soaring lines that cut across the chaos like a banner in a crosswind. The piece’s formal logic tracks Eisenstein‘s own theory of the “montage of attractions” with remarkable fidelity: bursts of combined guitar and violin energy are interrupted by abrupt, silencing caesuras, each cut amplifying the shock of the next. The effect is less a narrative illustration than a kinetic, almost tactile recreation of the staircase’s cascading horror. The final movement sonorises the film’s closing act—the battleship’s stand against the Tsarist fleet and, in its wake, the sailors’ reunion with one another. Structurally, “Una Contro Tutte” moves like a single, redemptive shockwave: guitars with a Hard Rock edge and a bass line of genuinely boisterous, physical force drive the track toward a climax of sustained high-energy impact. Vortexing synthesizer textures fuse with Maffeis‘ virtuosic violin lines in a passage of considerable technical ambition before the whole edifice begins to disperse. In the epilogue, as if surfacing from post-battle fog, piano and violin re-emerge alone, joining in a slow, expansive dance that is tender without being sentimental. It celebrates the victory of the preceding eight minutes while simultaneously leaving an open, interrogative suspension over what comes after—a final image that refuses the neat period of a traditional cadence. What “La Corazzata Potëmkin” accomplishes is not, in the first instance, a historical exercise. I Sincopatici have re-approached a century-old Cinematic text without resorting to period pastiche, military cadence, or the didacticism that so often mars re-scoring projects of this kind. What emerges instead is an original composition of considerable intellectual ambition and direct emotional force, a work that speaks to the film as a living structural and ideological document rather than a museum piece. The score finds its fullest expression in the context of the recolorised film, where the music’s dynamic extremes and its shifts between Chamber intimacy and full-band violence are given a visual counterpoint of extraordinary specificity. Yet the album’s 41 minutes possess a formal and harmonic coherence that allows it to function, and to a considerable degree should be heard, as an autonomous work of Avant-Garde composition and Cinematic Post-Rock. In either mode, the result is the same: a piece of music that earns its position among the more compelling current offerings in the Italian RIO and Avant-Prog field, and that marks I Sincopatici as a group whose trajectory, two records in, is already pointing toward a distinctly and increasingly confident voice.
Tracklist
01. Uomini E Vermi (05:50)
02. Dramma Sul Ponte (09:54)
03. Il Morto Chiama (07:06)
04. La Scalinata Di Odessa (08:54)
05. Una Contro Tutte (09:00)
Lineup
Francesca Badalini / Piano, Guitars
Silvia Maffeis / Violin
Andrea Grumelli / Fretless Bass, Soundscapes, Electronics
Teo Ravelli / Drums, Live Electronics