Cellist Janel Leppin and guitarist Anthony Pirog crossed paths at the same high school in Vienna, Virginia, outside Washington, D.C., throughout the 1990s, yet their musical partnership did not take shape until after graduation. Leppin spent her early years in Wedderburn, a cluster of modest cottages nestled in a quiet woodland that gradually transformed into an informal artists’ enclave, and during her university studies she regularly welcomed friends, Pirog among them, to the cottage for sessions of both composed pieces and free improvisation. She completed a cello performance degree at George Mason University in Fairfax County, Virginia, while Pirog first pursued jazz guitar studies at Berklee and later earned a jazz performance degree from N.Y.U. in 2004.
Although their academic routes diverged—Leppin immersing herself in North Indian, Persian, and Japanese classical traditions while Pirog gravitated toward avant-garde jazz and experimental approaches—their shared music-making at Wedderburn demonstrated an instinctive rapport, prompting them to launch performances under the name Janel & Anthony at venues around the D.C. area beginning in 2005. The next year they issued a self-released self-titled CD, later reissued on vinyl by Cricket Cemetery Records in 2011, and continued working both as a duo and with other collaborators. They brought the project to numerous East Coast stages and sustained wide-ranging tours, while each maintained active performing and recording schedules alongside musicians spanning experimental, modern classical, world music, jazz, and rock idioms.
Over a three-year stretch amid these commitments, Janel & Anthony recorded their second album at an analog studio in the Washington, D.C. region. Issued by Cuneiform in May 2012, Where Is Home showcases Leppin on cello along with loops, electronics, koto, harpsichord, accordion, and detuned autoharp, and Pirog on guitar plus electric sitar, bass, mandolin, and lap steel. The resulting sound is richly textured and atmospheric, reflecting the pair’s broad range of influences and conveying a mood of introspection and yearning for, in Leppin’s words, “a new, deep-seated home,” especially after Wedderburn was demolished to accommodate suburban development in the expanding greater Washington, D.C. real-estate market, even as the national housing bubble persisted.
