Hugely influential and appearing nearly everywhere within Washington D.C.'s contemporary music scene as bandleaders and contributing artistic voices, cellist and vocalist Janel Leppin and guitarist Anthony Pirog have long been creative partners as well as life partners. Their Cuneiform Records debut Where is Home (2012) is considered a crucial modern recording from the region. Following that release, the two have crafted a double-LP opus which crosses genres and mirrors their exploratory and dialogic working methods. New Moon in the Evil Age is their long-awaited follow up to Where is Home and will have immediate appeal to fans of beyond jazz, modern composition and improvisation, indie rock, and of D.C musical culture. Janel and Anthony make it clear in conversation that New Moon in the Evil Age is a harbinger of things to come as well as the distillation of a twenty year journey of life and work. This recording is only their third as a duo and this fact is somewhat surprising given the fact that they often pair up on each other’s various recorded and live projects. They have both been exceptionally active over the past decade since the release of Where Is Home, but even so, as Pirog notes, “Janel & Anthony has always been a priority for us. We’ve been chipping away at this new record whenever we could, despite life intervening! We're looking forward to having the opportunity now to prioritize our duo music, because we’ve done so much in between our records in terms of performances and planning.”  The 19 tracks of New Moon In The Evil Age, like the years it took to record it, flash by rather quickly, which is a testament to their vision and working process. Though organizing an opus takes time, a number of the pieces were written in short order, as the duo has a language and methodology so finely tuned that compositions can materialize with little provocation. Pirog observes, “We don’t even have to speak; we’re bringing certain ideas we’ve developed over twenty years of working and being together, which makes it so easy, because, really, we just sit down and music comes out.”

The album has a pretty clear division point, given that the first ten tracks are instrumental while the remaining nine are vocal and electronics-heavy. Rather than interpolating and ping-ponging sensibilities from song to song, the arc from soaring string interplay to synth-driven layered avant-pop is clear. Leppin remarks that, “This album is organic to us. We’ve never wanted to align to any particular genre, and we try and avoid limitations in our music."

Another factor in their unity of thought and of their sound heard here is emphasized through their long working relationship with The Brink recording studio and its engineer Mike Reina, of which Leppin observes, “The Brink is a huge part of Janel and Anthony records. We think of The Brink as a musical home and a place of freedom. We like to explore sonic textures in the studio, and Mike will go to the ends of the earth for tone. We had fun making it, but it’s also an intimate record for us.”