First Impressions: Hot Creek by Duffy x Uhlmann

After a long stretch of little to no precipitation, the rout of the severe drought plaguing our region commenced last month, when sporadic storms started sliding through the neighborhood more afternoons and early evenings than not. The deluges have restored reservoir levels to an extent, and green to encroach upon (but not completely erode) the lawn’s brown patches, but the turnaround hasn’t transformed this summer into a good one. Far from it. We live in an age of dissonance and disconnect, of social media conflations and TikTok trends. Pull back far enough and…how’s that old song go again? “From a distance, there is harmony/And it echoes through the land….” Zoom in too close and you’re overwhelmed: war and strife, famine and catastrophes, are everywhere. It’s easy, too easy, to lose hope—and to forget that, to borrow a quote from the Battlestar Galactica reboot, “All of this has happened before, and all of this will happen again.” 

The press release for guitarists Meg Duffy and Gregory Uhlmann’s second collaboration, Hot Creek, explains that the album delves into what the poet Adrienne Rich called “the dream of a common language.” Life need not be lived at loggerheads with others (or, for those plagued by self-doubt, ourselves) yet, too often, that’s exactly how it plays out. Duffy and Uhlmann strive to bridge those barriers in both playful and serious fashion, with their guitars—and the album is just them and their guitars—dancing, prancing and pirouetting across the soundscape. They flit and fly, engage in chaînés and chassés—sometimes in lockstep, sometimes not. It’s a sonic ballet, if you will. It’s hypnotic.

To switch metaphors, Hot Creek plays like a feeder stream flowing to a river that, in turn, leads to the sea. At times, the water gushes into rapids and waterfalls, rushing over manmade and natural dams, and even pushes past long-forgotten excavations. Other times, it slows to a hypnotic crawl, its gentle waves lapping the shore. Burbles, gurgles, whines, and arpeggios accent the goings-on; some tease, others frolic, and still others embrace the serious.

Not everyone enjoys instrumentals of the ambient, avant-garde, or improvisational kind, of course. The music is too abstract or intricate, and the lack of lyrics leaves them unsure of how to feel. For me, however, that’s the point. Hot Creek is akin to a Gyobeom An painting; it bypasses consciousness to explore the oft-hidden underpinnings of both the macro and micro aspects of life. It’s an addictive listen, in other words.