The body fractures first at the mouth. Breath escapes through that soft wound and enters metal, where pressure teaches it to grow a second skeleton. Inside Ka Baird’s flute and Chris Ryan Williams’s trumpet, air becomes vibration and is hurled against the skin as evidence of an internal crime. Enthalpy, their first album as a duo, begins inside this rupture and keeps widening it. Tongue flutters swarm beneath glass; sustained tones split open, exposing electronic tissue under the instrumental disguise. Production magnifies each gesture until the musicians seem to play inside a colossal organ wired with circuits. The horns sometimes gleam with surgical cruelty, then dissolve into murk. Along the way, the listener’s skull becomes an unauthorized extension of the mixing desk, and the body envelope reveals itself as a frightened hypothesis.

Thermodynamics defines enthalpy as the energy contained within a system, though Baird and Williams treat containment as anatomical vanity. Recorded through complete improvisation, these pieces generate bones faster than any stable creature could house them. A pulse grows cartilage. Feedback sprouts an inner ear and listens to itself. Sub-bass pushes through the floor while high frequencies slip needles between the teeth. The musicians give this mutation a terrifying equilibrium, as every threatened collapse creates another load-bearing surface. Acoustic gestures enter circuitry and return without fingerprints. Listening becomes involuntary disassembly, with flesh assuming the work of amplification.

“Spirit” closes a circle before its opening can be found. Guttural utterances inhabit boundaries that electronic distortions repeatedly puncture, while digital effluvia impersonate expectations long enough to disfigure them. Rebuilding these fragments into overarching beauty soon feels vain. Beauty resides in decomposition, in form choosing to rot publicly. The piece devours its remains and regurgitates them until an internal structure emerges, a nervous system inventing the creature whose pain it already conducts.

“Target Practice” drives this corporeal confusion into the listener’s taxonomic reflexes. Its expectorations and tongue-flicked flute tempt us to assign the piece a stable body, then congratulate ourselves for solving its existence. Baird and Williams answer classification with sabotage. Breath becomes percussion without surrendering intimacy; vocal matter crawls toward language, then bites through the leash. The electronics expose how foreign the acoustic source already was. Trumpet depends upon saliva conspiring with metal, while flute persuades a tube to dream through expelled air. “Shapeshifting” and “Visible Ghosts” miniaturize the process, allowing brief gestures to touch without turning contact into romance. Their intimacy remains cellular and faintly hostile.

Even the tender passages refuse innocence. “Vapour Trails” and “Out of Breath” gather around ethereal melody, yet their tones already admit the noise that will erase them. White noise becomes the exposed tissue beneath melody’s cosmetic surface. Baird and Williams let delicacy approach extinction without intervening, making tenderness physically credible. Anything incapable of damage is décor, and these pieces decline to hang politely on the wall of cultivated sensitivity.

“Fail Better” opens the album’s procedures to scrutiny while withholding a reassuring outcome. Near-language approaches meaning, though it offers interpretation no purchase. Beckett’s exhausted imperative hovers over the title, but failure becomes muscular here, forcing sound beyond the competent decisions that domesticate it. Effects worry the performance until it confesses that no pristine entity waits beneath the processing.

The title track enlarges the ethics of transplantation to grotesque proportions. Echo becomes a mechanism of self-cancellation, returning each detail with enough force to injure its source. Everyday life is pulsed into grayness seething with compressed difference. Repetition elicits bodily revision; each recurrence carries scar tissue. Beneath the sonic density, the horns persist as damaged evidence, apertures through which the performers enter the machinery.

“Spirit II” returns us to the circle, or so it seems, as we have actually been trapped inside it since the first inhalation. Throaty cackles merge with subterranean growls as human utterance and manufactured signal lose their border. These sounds are turned inward, acquiring unauthorized voices and reducing consciousness to a minor administrative office within the body. Breath has never belonged to us. It passes through, borrows platelets, then carries microscopic proof of our existence into another system.

Enthalpy locates transcendence inside that transfer, stripped of celestial upholstery. Energy changes residence, enters matter, and leaves with matter’s accent lodged inside it. The self survives as a distortion imposed upon whatever passes through. We endure as alterations in the medium, minute damages carried forward by air that has learned to imitate the voice we hear when reading these words.