Fondali is part of Schallfeld Ensemble’s project “A Clockwork Orange”. Linked from the start to the soundtrack of Stanley Kubrick’s movie, this project explores the concepts of transcription and remixing, while broadening the scope through research into the relationships between tradition and technical innovation, between standards and new creations, between sound and moving images.

Fondali takes its cue from the famed Overture in Rossini’s “La Gazza Ladra”, and makes a drastic departure through a host of manipulations and distortions so that the piece reemerges more or less explicitly after being hypothetically immersed among various fondali, or “seabeds” and underwater scenes, where one might plausibly come across shipwrecks and other vestiges of human activity, besides natural elements. At the same time, fondali may also refer to theatrical backdrops. In either case, the term is pluralized, denoting an array of situations.

In order to avoid mere quotation, or what’s worse, useless re-orchestrations, my aim was to retain the grotesque aspect of the scene in which the main character in ‘A Clockwork Orange’, Alex, beats the writer and rapes his wife, adding remixes and bits of Rossini’s Overture, selected and sampled from various versions and recordings from the past fifty years.