ALT Smoke, sometimes, gets in your ears. Neuma Records announces the release of Fumée, featuring world premiere recordings of three major orchestral works by British-American composer Geoffrey Gordon. Each composition transforms visual art into music: Willem de Kooning’s explosive Abstract Expressionism, a haunting Belle Époque chanson, and the early-20th-century Synchromist movement’s “color orchestration” all find new life through Gordon’s vividly imagined scores. The album opens with Gotham News (2018), Gordon’s response to de Kooning’s staggering 1955 painting of the same name. “If it could talk, the work would yell,” a critic wrote of the canvas—a description that immediately hooked the composer, who spent part of his youth in New York. Housed in Buffalo, the painting’s “controlled chaos” of newspaper transfers and jarring colors becomes music that “explodes with the same motor-rhythmic force of de Kooning’s brushstrokes.”

ALT Soprano, violin, and orchestra join forces in this intimate epic from long ago and far away (but relevant to here and now). Acclaimed violinist and composer Ittai Shapira’s Chunhyang features two-time Grammy Award-winning soprano Hila Plitmann and the Royal Scottish National Orchestra conducted by Florin Parvulescu in a dramatic concerto inspired by a 400-year-old tale of female empowerment, love, resilience, and hope. A sweeping narrative work, Chunhyang (2019) reimagines Korea’s most famous folktale—the story of a woman’s unwavering virtue in the face of authoritarian corruption—through a unique global musical lens. Shapira, described by The New York Times as “an Israeli dynamo,” crafts a concerto where East meets West not as a collision, but as a conversation. Immersing himself in the raw timbral intensity of the Korean Pansori storytelling tradition, Shapira explores its shared musical DNA with Celtic music and the Blues

ALT The title track – the evocative Continuous Interior by New York composer Robert Honstein – draws inspiration from the modern experience of limitless, bounded spaces – shopping malls, airport terminals, vast warehouses – and translates that feeling into waves of resonant sound, where vibraphone tones sparkle above neon, quasi-techno synth textures. The album also features Andrea Mazzariello’s powerful and moving Figure to Ground. Mazzariello’s composition explores rhythmic perception on a massive scale, unfolding a single syncopated figure until the sense of pulse dissolves, only to be gently reasserted by a late-breaking melody. It is, in the composer’s words, an invitation to find “a kind of pleasure in this liquified listening.” “These works are deeply connected by a sense of exploration and scale,” says Fisher. “Honstein’s piece is about moving through a vast, unfolding interior. Mazzariello’s is about focusing on a single syncopated figure, unfolded on a massive scale.

ALT Photo credits: Nils Henrik Asheim by Line Owren, Ming Tsao by Markus Sepperer, Yeah No (Chris Speed, Jim Black, Skúli Sverrisson, Cuong Vu) via Dice, Carrie Henneman Shaw by KARJAKA, Ross Lee Finney via Library of Congress, Le Ray au soleyl by Johannes Ciconia (Mancini Codex), Roust Poziumski via the artist, Simon Hanes by Robert Wright (New York Times), Ensemble Satenay (Szilárd Chereji, Elodie Wiemer, Julia von Landsberg, Orí Harmelin) by Hagen Schnauss, Bonnie Whiting via the artist, Peter Maxwell Davies via ClassicFM, Sam Pluta via the artist. Flotation Device features creative and improvised music from the Northwest and around the world with host Michael Schell, Sunday nights 10pm–Midnight Pacific Time on 91.3 KBCS-FM Bellevue/Seattle/Tacoma. Visit us online at https://www.mixcloud.com/FlotationDevice