As a duo, Ka Baird and Chris Ryan Williams present a study in contrasts. Baird, a multi-instrumentalist and vocalist, favors density and percussive force, while Williams, a trumpeter, tends to work in subliminal textures and blurred, dissolving tones. They have a lot in common, too: Both use electronics to manipulate their sounds past the point of recognition, and both make music that has a spooky interiority, like a network of gradually constricting tunnels or a slowly flooding grotto. 

The two previously worked together on Baird’s Bearings: Soundtrack for the Bardos, an ultra-Bairdean work of uncompromising spiritual menace from 2024. Enthalpy, on which Williams receives co-billing, takes a more equitable approach. Though we get plenty of Baird’s signature glottal stops and fricative mouth noises (think Mike Patton on horse tranquilizers or Jonathan Davis performing something by Meredith Monk) on tracks such as “Shapeshifting” and “Target Practice,” there’s also a lot of oblique, thrumming melodies and grainy, nocturnal drones, indicating Williams at work. It’s an intriguing mix that doesn’t always gel, but gelling may not be a priority.

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Most of Enthalpy has the gestural looseness of spontaneous composition. Songs are short and built on a basic pairing—Baird’s punchy flute syncopations, which often sound like he’s shooting a poison dart from a blowpipe, and Williams’ elongated trumpet smears, cut up and spliced together. Combined, these two distinct approaches can achieve an uneasy, melancholy harmony, as on the hypnotic “Vapour Trails,” which sounds like something Ennio Morricone might have written for a John Carpenter film. On other pieces, the musicians appear to take turns doing their respective things, dividing songs into sections. The title track, by far the longest piece on the album at nine and a half minutes, begins in a very Baird-forward manner, with an array of valve rustles, batlike vocal chirps, suction sounds, and miscellaneous sibilance, but, after reaching near-industrial levels of ambiguous grind, it shifts into processed waves of flute, trumpet, and synth. The waves grow thicker and choppier, their sources becoming occluded, eventually merging into a surprisingly musical maelstrom of eddying drones, corrugated breath, and mussed melody. As a statement of purpose, its dissonances, transformations, and ultimate balance are just about perfect. 

The title track’s weird coherence does make some of the lesser tracks feel like experiments that didn’t pan out. This is especially noticeable on the 48-second “Out of Breath,” a reverb-laden swirl of falsetto creaks, and “Fail Better,” a welter of pincushion flute, digital scribbles, and throaty croaks.. But success might not be the goal, here, as the title of “Fail Better” indicates. For music this uncompromising and out-there, the process is just as, if not more, important as the result. Baird and Wiliams like to expose the false starts, dead ends, and fruitless investigations that form a large chunk of music-making; they show us their work while revealing the wonder that work can sometimes lead to. Enthalpy may operate under strange pressure, but it taps into a fundamental energy.

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