Cinna Peyghamy: Tombak To The Future

Both Peyghamy's parents emigrated from Iran to France in the early 1980s, and he grew up in Paris with a unique opportunity to try many different creative practices at the social centre his mother worked at. As well as pottery and other art classes, he was able to try his hand at guitar, djembe and other instruments, as well as early loop-based music production software. A self-professed computer nerd, he's maintained a dual fascination with acoustic and electronic music ever since. He was playing drums in indie bands from his early teens while getting deeper into DAW-based production at home. His experience deepened and he started collecting synths and drum machines, playing synths with one group and eventually, in 2017, producing two albums of leftfield bass music under his Cikkun alias. In his early 20s, Peyghamy's studies in musical computer programming led him to move to Saint Etienne in central France.

Shortly before moving, a family friend showed him a video of Mohammad Reza Mortazavi — the celebrated Iranian tombak virtuoso bringing the ancient, traditional instrument into the contemporary music realm.

"I was never really interested in tombak because I thought it was an accompanying instrument," says Peyghamy. "When I saw this famous video of Mortazavi playing in the Philharmonic in Berlin, I nearly fell out of my chair. I never heard somebody play the tombak like that. To my ear, it sounded like granular techno. I found someone in Paris that helped me get a tombak and started to teach me, and then when I left for Saint Etienne I found a teacher nearby in Lyon and took the train every week to do my tombak lessons."

Having started his journey into tombak and modular synthesis around 2018, Peyghamy was just hitting his stride and getting a few live performances under his belt when COVID arrived. The forced pause allowed him to reach out to various institutions across France and create opportunities for playing shows once restrictions were lifted, and eventually in 2022 he performed his first international gig in Berlin that created a snowball effect towards his wider presence in experimental electronic music. In June 2026 he played his 100th tombak-modular show. This intensive period of performing was a necessary process to develop his practice while he contemplated how to capture his music on record. The idea of an album had been with him since 2020 and he developed some recordings of improvised shows for low-key EP releases, but it was only in 2025 Peyghamy felt ready to sit down with a considered process in mind to realise the potential in his unique approach.

"I wanted to make a tombak album with the spirit of an electronic producer," he explains. "The idea was not to make a jazz album, or a classical tombak album. The idea was to make a tombak album made by an electronic producer, where the performer side of me met the producer side of me."

"My track 'Mutosy' is all automation of Rings—it was actually my challenge to make techno. Since I come from bass music, I'm more used to breaks and cuts. I wanted to do a continuous thing. I was listening to a lot of Polygonia and Rrose."

The other fundamental tool that shaped the character of Music For Tombak & Synth was Live's native Vocoder device. With his live modular setup, one of Peyghamy's signature moves involves triggering a VCA envelope with his tombak playing to control the amplitude and decay of a long sample such as a vocal or musical drone, essentially chopping up the sample on the fly according to his drumming. While working on ideas for the album, he contemplated how to take this idea further and realised the Vocoder added the possibility to control the spectral dimension of a sound. When he hits a long, bassy note, the Vocoder will only play the lower frequencies, and when he makes a sharp, high-pitched hit the response of the Vocoder opens up just a tiny amount.

As well as applying the Vocoder to his own tombak sounds, Peyghamy controlled the device with his playing to process sounds from other musicians. The track 'Divân دیوان' features setar player Mahmood Schricker, and the original recording ebbs and flows through the track with the lilt of the Vocoder opening and closing around the tombak percussion.

"The vocoder is so good because, on a compositional level, it allows you to decorrelate rhythm and melody, but still to write a sound phrase that has both. Let's say I have a track with a beat I recorded on the tombak. I will duplicate this track and put a Vocoder on it. Then I create a third track where I would put, for example, a setar sample, and I will send this into the Vocoder on the second track. So the second track creates the rhythm, and the third track creates the melody. Now I can have this interplay between acoustic sound, the triggers, and the melody that's being triggered. Every track on the album has this setup, and this is how I would write or generate ideas."

Having made the album, Peyghamy had to consider how he would approach future live shows. While his purely improvised tombak and modular performances continued to be an impressive offering for audiences at concerts and festivals, this approach didn't have a direct relationship to the music on the album. Any tour in support of Music For Tombak & Synth required a rethink. While it wouldn't be possible for him to recreate the exact sound of the album on stage, he relished the challenge of reverse engineering the elements of the album to find a creative way to reinterpret the material.

"The album was inspired from the live show. Now I do a live show inspired by the album."

The first fundamental difference to consider was that of the clock. All the album tracks were produced on the grid in Live, with the idea they could be playable for DJs. When performing live, Cinna never works to a metronome, and so the album tracks became very different. It all hinges around the physicality of the tombak as the energetic source at the heart of his setup. He was clear that he didn't want to rely on playing back stems of the album material, as that would mean adhering to a clock, so he instead focused on working with samples from the album material he could trigger with his playing. The key was to find a portable sampler that would take MIDI trigger messages sent from the tombak through the modular rig — eventually he settled on the 1010Music Blackbox.

The sounds from each Live project for each track are sorted into samples arranged in folders, with the possibility to create presets on the Blackbox for each track to determine how different samples are triggered. Some will be sliced and played randomly according to the tombak playing, some will play a whole sound at a particular moment, and others are one-shots like an 808 sub bass that Peyghamy can fire off manually alongside his tombak playing. Compared to the relatively simple way he was triggering a sample module with his previous live setup, he's able to get more expressive control and create a new version of the album tracks during every performance.