Since he was young, Cinna Peyghamy has been fascinated by how things work. First, he was fascinated by how to create electronic music on a computer, then by the idea of modular synthesizers. He saw someone else playing them and wondered how they worked and what the logic behind them was. He set out to discover the answer. Later came his roots. He was born in France to Iranian parents, but had never visited Iran. The tumbak appeared in his life, a situation that could be romanticized as a kind of calling from his roots, or as a way of suppressing his physical/earthly disconnection from his parents’ country through a traditional instrument.
That video by Mohammad-Reza Mortazavi caught his attention. The foundations he already had with percussion instruments aroused his curiosity to experiment with it and look for a way to combine learning the instrument with his fixation on electronics. Cinna Peyghamy plays the tumbak connected to a modular synthesizer, creating two parallel cycles of rhythm, both analog and both traditional in their origins. This means that Cinna Peyghamy’s music is not necessarily experimental, or, on the contrary, functional; it is a hybrid that respects more of an idea of a living formula than something static in a combination of processes.
His performances—some of which can be found on YouTube—more than his albums—out of curiosity, it is worth listening to The Skin In Between, from 2023—are the natural way to listen to Cinna Peyghamy, because the two instruments exist better in the unexpected than in the fixed regime of what is recorded. Cinna knows how to fly in this combination, sometimes seeking beautiful melodies and becoming mesmerized—and mesmerizing—by them, or letting himself be carried away by labyrinthine ideas that can lead to noise-aspiring dead ends.
AS
