The time after the performance
Comminuere Communitas places Andrew Lang and Tim Koch’s piano collaboration at two moments. The first is their 2024 PianoLab festival performance at the venue Immersive Light & Art (ILA). The second is an album constructed from memory and resampling more than a year later. Released by Mahorka on November 7 as mhrk516, it makes that distance part of the production. The useful starting point for a listener is the change in the work’s object: material from a live encounter has become material for a subsequent composition.[1]
The forces make the transformation concrete. Lang is credited with upright piano and electronics, Koch with electronics and Rhodes electric piano. Synthesizers and granular sampling also belonged to the live design. The pair sampled each other as well as themselves. A sound’s connection to the musician who played it therefore passes through further operations before the final arrangement. My reading is that the collaboration’s musical unit extends beyond two keyboard players performing together: each also supplies material the other can reorganize.[1]
A second arrangement of the material
The material has more than one point of origin. Work from the musicians’ individual projects was combined with music written specifically for the concert. That makes the album harder to understand simply as the later publication of an earlier show. Previously written material and concert-specific music both become available for further arrangement. Identifying the version requires a broader question than which notes were first played that evening: which parts of that playing became components of the later construction? The method described in the release notes exposes that further compositional space.[1]
The sequence opens with When In Rhodes, followed by Faux Departs, Autohymn, Hangs False and Obadeea. Those five pieces provide the released object with its own listening route. The opening title’s reference to Rhodes cannot turn the whole album into documentation of one instrument; upright piano and electronics remain part of the credited forces. A more useful approach reads instrument names, players and resampling together. It creates room to consider a sound’s original source alongside its role in the finished arrangement.[1]
The piano’s new role
The release notes describe a remembered and resampled echo of the original performance. That account extends the piano’s role beyond the moment at the keyboard: played sound can be selected again, divided and placed within a shared arrangement. This is the album’s concrete proposition as I read it. The listener can approach the new combination of upright piano, Rhodes and electronics instead of expecting an exhaustive account of the concert. The work takes its identity from the labor between the live starting point and the form constructed afterward.[1]