Lyonnais started in 2008 as a musical outlet for longtime friends and collaborators Farbod Kokabi and Farzad Moghaddam. Immediately after witnessing a Rhys Chatham performance, the duo realized that they needed to fill a void in Atlanta's otherwise vibrant music scene. Practicing wherever they could (often after hours in the offices of Georgia State University's radio station), Moghaddam (bass, synth, vox) and Kokabi (guitar, synth, vox) set out to develop their ideas, enlisting additional support from Lee Tesche (guitar, vox) and TJ Blake (drums & percussion). Capturing Labradford's brooding post rock and Spacemen 3's signature drones, the group's early live experiments were honed while sharing the stage with Deerhunter, Windy & Carl, Growing, Lightning Bolt, and Grouper.



 

Want for Wish for Nowhere is Lyonnais ' LP debut and above all else captures the group's dark and mesmerizing live presence. Recorded and produced entirely by the band themselves, the songs' deft interweaving of the crystalline and the murky have been fine-tuned since the group's beginnings into a singular aesthetic redolent of their psych-drone forebears while sonically aware of contemporaneous synth-drift architects like Oneohtrix Point Never and Stellar Om Source.

 

Album opener "Transitive Properties of youth" highlights Lyonnais' chaotic precision, layering howling walls of guitar and calculated percussion reminiscent of Seefeel's finer moments, while a droning maelstrom of synth, sax and piano blurs and then explodes into a blown-out howl of MBV-style feedback. Elsewhere, "The Fatalist" sees Kokabi and Tesche exchanging ghostly vocals within the confines of an off-filter pop tune. "Modern Cavalry" trudges along at a slow and steady pace, packing murk and grit of the sort normally wielded by Nick Cave before pummeling percussion erupts and obliterates everything in its path. With Want For Wish For Nowhere, Lyonnais has somehow perfected a sound with a mere handful of tracks what kraut-noise veterans like Oneida and Wooden Shjips took a decade to figure out. Want For Wish For Nowhere is dream-pop for avid noise heads, raging psych for ambient lovers .