Orindal

DUFFY X UHLMANN- Hot Creek ORD-92


Release date: August 14, 2026

“A last attempt: the language is a dialect called metaphor.
These images go unglossed: hair, glacier, flashlight.
When I think of a landscape I am thinking of a time.
When I talk of taking a trip I mean forever.
I could say: these mountains have a meaning
But further than that I could not say.

To do something very common, in my own way.”

– Adrienne Rich, “A Valediction Forbidding Mourning”

Hot Creek, the second album from Meg Duffy and Gregory Uhlmann’s project Duffy x Uhlmann, unspools in the spirit of what poet Adrienne Rich called “a dream of a common language.” Taking Hot Creek, the geothermal spring that courses through Mono County, California, as its guiding metaphor, Duffy and Uhlmann’s melodic conversation both carves out a streambed and fills it with all temporalities of water: rapid, eddy, flood. In this sonic cartography, the waterway holds the trickling improvisations in the same way that grammar holds language, a container for what inevitably exceeds containment.

In this exquisite and existential elaboration of their collaboration, Duffy and Uhlmann develop the shared syntax initiated in their debut album Doubles. With only two guitars, Hot Creek departs from the first album’s gritty, urban soundscape, touching down in the natural world to explore a different dream. Like the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus’s well worn adage that you can’t step in the same river twice, these songs chart constant change, loss, and discovery, eschewing staticness of place and space. Hot Creek traverses – with both mischievousness and grief – the fact of impermanence, slips of the tongue, valuing equally what is lost and what is found, and what is made new through evolutions of repetition.

The opening track, “Doing It for Me,” winks at the fact of collaboration: a palimpsest-like collective of two individuals trying to reach each other. Here, they establish a rhythmic base that feels like a time-lapse bloom and ends with a swirling gallop, and slowly introduce bubbling guitar riffs that pirouette before becoming part of the ensemble of inside jokes and shifting moods. “To Be a Good Friend” opens and closes with the sound of footsteps and muffled voices approaching and receding. Like any good conversationalist, Duffy and Uhlmann have mastered the art of crescendo, but also the art of trailing off. In other words, the art of withstanding the space between true connection and fundamental mysteriousness of the other. “Plumeria” follows with agile and sweet staccato, punctuated by bright and soothing pauses: so much is said in the space between the riffs.

From these caesuras, the album thematizes the relationship between any utterance and what it obscures. “Sewering” drops us underground, where echoing drips ricochet through rusted pipes and crickets sing in the dark. We listen to “Public Life” from below, a soothing melancholic interlude of seeing and being seen that alludes to the currents underneath. This tentative lullaby culminates with the twang of the title track, “Hot Creek” and “The Source,” which slow everything to a near-hypnotic suspension, all while turning wide-eyed toward origin, centering the wonder of hearing a song before it hardens into predetermined meaning. This is musical language getting born, leading us to ask where does the water come from? Where does the love go? To answer these questions, the album widens into deep time with “Finding Methuselah,” which ricochets and reverbs notes between a four thousand year old tree aching on a hillside in Inyo County and the Milky Way itself.

Duffy and Uhlmann’s Hot Creek gives us the gift of listening to the birth of a common language in real time. Their melodies and rhythms move with the sweet vernacular of geothermic water and all its earthly infrastructures, accomplishing the profound potential of nonauthorship only collaboration allows, while also in Rich’s words, doing something very common, in their own way.

– Rosie Stockton

Tracks

  1. Doing It for Me (1:45)
  2. To Be a Good Friend (1:17)
  3. Plumeria (1:46)
  4. Sewering (2:20)
  5. Public Life (3:06)
  6. Hot Creek (2:26)
  7. The Source (3:52)
  8. May Doe (3:31)
  9. Finding Methuselah (2:40)
  10. Nylon Waiting Room (0:48)
  11. If I To Choose (5:07)
  12. Crystal Geyser (2:11)
  13. One for Joseph (1:49)

    14. Credits

      Performed, composed, and recorded by Meg Duffy and Gregory Uhlmann
      Mixed by Joseph Lorge
      Mastered by Matthew Barnhart

      Artwork by Christina Huang

      (p) Terrorbird (Meg Duffy) & International Anthem Publishing (Gregory Uhlmann), 2026

      Pressing Information

      Vinyl edition
      600 high quality, 150g vinyl LPs in extra heavyweight, full color, reverse board jackets. Design by Christina Huang. 13 tracks, 33 minutes.

      300 copies on creek water clear vinyl
      300 copies on classic black vinyl

      Vinyl manufactured by Smashed Plastic in Chicago, IL.
      Jackets printed by Stoughton Printing in City of Industry, CA.

      Tape edition
      150 professionally dubbed FerroMaster tapes in smoky grey shells imprinted with silver ink. Tapes are packaged in 3-panel J-cards with alternate art & clear Norelco boxes. Design by Christina Huang. 13 tracks, 33 minutes.

      Tapes manufactured by National Audio in Nashville, TN.

      Hot Creek vinyl & cassettes distributed by The Business & Revolver / Midheaven.