" Sound artist Stephen Cornford stumbled across pianist Samuel Rodgers photocopying pages of Morton Feldman's Triadic Memories (a good omen) when both were students at Dartington College of Arts, and Turned Moment, weighting features Cornford's realtime feedback treatments of Rodgers's touchy-feely, incisive playing on piano and miscellaneous objects.

Impressively, this taut 45 minute disc was culled – as detailed on an interview on the Another Timbre website – from a weekend-long recording session of their improvisations. Some of that material has, apparently, been filtered off for another project; what remains here, however, spotlights an intriguing tension between the seamless, relentless hum of the electronics, which transcends time, and the unstable rattling and evolving mantras of the piano Rodgers still occupying countable time. There's a bewitchingly beautiful moment during the second track as all the sounds coalesce, then hover, around an open octave – a gesture not normally part of the improvised music lexicon – which then broadens its harmonic reach to inhabit some unexpectedly conventional triad relationships which the overlaid feedback peels apart, as though sound has been illuminated with an x-ray."

Philip Clark (The Wire)

"A recent entry in Another Timbre's "byways" series, intended less as finished releases and more as snapshot documents of a scene. Cornford (piano feedback) and Rodgers (piano & objects) are both new names to me and based on this, I hope to hear more soon. Very calm, soft underlying drones, presumably generated via feedback, accompanied by plectral sounds from within the piano, vibrating devices against strings, etc. I could see some listeners finding the first two pieces overly drone-y/chime-y, though I enjoyed them throughout. The last track, however ("turning"), edges into darker environs, the drones arcing toward scrapes, the chimes hardening into more foreboding thuds. It's a very strong and complete piece, well worth hearing. Looking forward to more."

Brian Olewnick (Just Outside)

"The title may read as obtuse, but the sound world explored on this release is anything but. The duo generate a floating field of pin-prick, crystalline feedback, piano strings prepared in media res [the recording is taken from several hours of their improvising, edited by Cornford] and, here and there, struck piano keys. I have vowed to myself to write about this area of music without using the by now codified adjective Feldmanesque; I may now have to take up that vow after this write up. The sound sources are two pianos and a feedback system Cornford designed that allows unstable, aleatory and sometimes noisy sounds to infiltrate the sober piano tones. Suspended pitches hang in the air with small, barely-controlled feedback squalls. Overall, with Cornford's post-production work, the three sections never spin out of orbit, the center holds.

Anyone who liked the territory explored in the Tilbury/Schmickler release Variety, or Paiuk/Kahn's beautiful Breathings will want to check this out. As in those two antecedents, there is an interface of piano and lacings of nuanced electronics. Cornford has very consciously chosen the instrument arguably most history-burdened and exhaustively plumbed for radical musicans, determined to find something new to say nonetheless. The results of this duo's intimate meeting merits close, repeated listens. "

Jesse Goin (Crow with no mouth)

Stephen Cornford and Samuel Rodgers' Turned Moment, weighting is a new entry in the Byways series of CDRs, created to quickly disseminate music by up-and-coming musicians. Cornford is credited with piano feedback and Rodgers uses piano and objects. For this recording, the two spent a weekend in the studio with two pianos and Cornford's bank of lo-fi speakers, pickups, and electronics. The pianos were placed side-by-side so that Rodgers' string and keyboard treatments on one instrument created sympathetic vibrations on the other which became the input for Cornford's electronic treatments. Attack, resonance, and timbral manipulations serve as both input and output, and the three improvisations gather weight from the accretion and processing of sonic events, moving between precise control and chance-driven feedback loops. Each explores a different set of sonic qualities, from crystalline, sine-like oscillations to gritty treatments and overtones. Percussive tones, pinpoint flutters, bell-like rattles, abraded textures, and the jangling buzz of damped strings are looped in to the quavering drones and hanging scrims of electronics. The pieces flow with a drawn-out sense of time and progression, letting pools of sound gather and then methodically modulate resonance and decay. It's a rich and resourceful offering from two new voices to keep an eye out for

Michael Rosenstein (Paris Transatlantic)

Cornford and Rodgers extend the Cageian challenge of the piano’s nature on Turned Moment, weighting. Cornford comes from a sculpting background, and here he works with piano feedback. To him the piano is a big shaped thing with movable parts, like a kinetic sculpture; sound is also something to be shaped. Rodgers, who is credited with piano and objects, is also drawn to the malleability of sound. His clanking, chiming attacks on the strings make impressions on the ribbons of feedback, like a piano roll puncher that can’t quite get through the paper. A listener unfamiliar with the notion of prepared piano might never know that the instrument was involved.

Bill Meyer (Signal to Noise)

The final entry in the series is Turned Moment, weighting (AT-B07) by Stephen Cornford and Samuel Rodgers, released in Another Timbre’s special series of CD-Rs. Cornford is a sound and installation artist (his work also includes trespassing on the London site of the 2012 Olympics) and here he’s working with feedback, micing a piano that Rodgers plays in an extremely minimalist way. Like the work of Sebastian Lexer, it’s meditative in the extreme, clearly touching on the music of Morton Feldman, and while it possesses little of Lexer’s technical sophistication, it’s nonetheless beautiful work, slowly unfolding music that maintains an extraordinary concentration, taking on the quality of a Japanese temple gong (a fundamental legacy of Cage’s interests in prepared piano, Zen Buddhism and I Ching: take the definitive Western instrument and make it as Eastern as possible). There’s an intense sense of the spatial here, as if Cornford is using the piano and its electronic feedback to measure the room, its psychological parameters as well as its physical dimensions.

Stuart Broomer (Point of Departure)