Meg Duffy & Gregory Uhlmann will release their second album of guitar duets, Hot Creek, this Friday, August 14 on Orindal Records! In advance of Friday's release, the duo have shared one last advance single from Hot Creek, a 51-second instrumental titled "Nylon Waiting Room." The single is accompanied by another beautiful visualizer by album art designer Christina Huang. Watch it below:
Hot Creek is available for pre-order on creek water color vinyl, classic black vinyl, cassette tape & digital formats HERE.
Duffy x Uhlmann will celebrate the release of Hot Creek with an album release show at Sid the Cat Auditorium in Pasadena, CA on August 19. Tickets are available HERE.
Plant Material is the first full-length album from Sand Duney, the project of songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Jess Jones (Dear Nora, Jessica Dennison + Jones, Hot Gum, Cynthia Nelson Band). Plant Material builds on the sonic landscape and themes present in Sand Duney’s three song EP, The Julia Loop, released in 2021. Starting that year, Jones went back to school to study landscape design and sustainable gardening, which led to a radical shift in how she interacted with and understood the plant world—both its extreme vulnerabilities in the changing climate and its resiliencies—and how she understood herself, her partnership, and her community. The year she started school, she also married her wife. From the outset, “Out On A Dune” places us at the edge of the ocean, on the cusp of new and enduring love. Jones sings, “Feels like / A different sun / Has come up.”
Jess Jones played every instrument on Plant Material, including pedal steel, acoustic and electric guitar, bass, organ, and drums. She also recorded and mixed the record herself at home in Portland, OR and Missoula, MT. At first, Jones started experimenting with creating recordings that were one-take performances direct to 2-track reel-to-reel, often based around loops or underlying grooves. Her deep love of classic country and jazz recordings led her to think about how much those recordings relied on the magic of live performance. All the instrumental songs on Plant Material—“Spring” “Tilth” and “Mycelium”—are all direct to tape recordings, with no overdubs. Others, like “Jacaranda” “Deadnettle” and “Pages” have a bed of the original direct-to-tape grooves, but were then multi-tracked over. With this method, the songs on Plant Material achieve a feeling of spontaneous playing and the snapshot in time of live performance, but are also meticulously crafted and edited. The result is a record that moves and sounds like water through a deep canyon, every layer guiding us somewhere new.
Plant Material will be released September 4 by Anything Bagel, Bud Tapes & Orindal Records. Cassette tapes w/ downloads can be purchases direct from Orindal. Vinyl & standalone downloads can be purchased via Bandcamp.
Catch Sand Duney live!
Aug 13, 2026- Daisy Chain Fest, Missoula, MT Sept 03, 2026- Seattle, WA @ House Show w/ Eli Moore (Lake), 129,600 Sept 04, 2026- Langley, WA @ Salad Days Records w/ Eli Moore (Lake), 129,600 Sept 05, 2026- Portland, OR @ Turn Turn Turn, w/ Cynthia Nelson Band, Dragging an Ox Through Water
Meg Duffy & Gregory Uhlmann perform "Public Life" from Duffy x Uhlmann's forthcoming album Hot Creek (out August 14 on Orindal Records). Video by Alex LaLiberte.
HOT CREEK, THE SECOND COLLABORATIVE ALBUM BY THE DUO OF MEG DUFFY & GREGORY UHLMANN (FOLLOWING THEIR 2023 DEBUT DOUBLES) IS OUT AUGUST 14 ON ORINDAL RECORDS
“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.
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.
Photo credit: Harrison Whitford
