Inside Siam Modular, the Chiang Mai Workshop Where Red Drum Builds Thailand's First Eurorack Synths

The Workshop in Changpuak

In a house in Chiang Mai's Changpuak district, Pete Wallis solders together the only Eurorack modular synthesizers built in Thailand. His company, Siam Modular, ships hand-built circuit boards to studios from Bangkok to Berlin, and it started, like most things in this story, from necessity rather than ambition.

Eurorack, the modular format where every knob, filter and oscillator lives on its own detachable panel, has spread fast worldwide over the last decade. It is biggest in Asia in Japan, China and Hong Kong. But within Southeast Asia, "Thailand is where it's at," according to Chiang Mai Citylife, which has tracked the city's small community of builders and patchers since 2022.

From Newcastle to a Swamp in Kalimantan

Wallis started building synths in 1998, while studying music technology in the UK. It was not a creative flourish. Vintage synthesizers were already climbing out of reach in price, and there was no affordable analogue gear on the new-build market to replace them, so he learned to make his own.

The move to Thailand happened almost by accident. A friend wanted a travel companion for a volunteering stint with the Orangutan Foundation in Borneo, and Wallis said yes. She found out she was pregnant not long before the trip and dropped out, but he went anyway, and spent six weeks living in a hut above a Kalimantan swamp with no phone signal and no internet. "I got some true clarity to contemplate what I might do and where I'd go next after travelling," he told Mixmag Asia in 2023. He settled in Chiang Mai in 2012.

Building Takaab

Siam Modular launched in 2018, and Wallis is candid that the company still runs on hobbyist logic even as it has become, by his own account, Thailand's first modular synthesizer company, a title that puts it in the same small club as Durian Radio, the country's first streaming station, as a piece of Thai music infrastructure someone had to build from nothing. Its flagship line, Takaab, splits into an analogue mono-synth voice and a run of low-cost utility modules, the unglamorous jacks and mixers that hold a rack together.

That second category is where his pricing philosophy shows. Eurorack utility modules often carry the same markup as flagship synth voices, despite using simple, boilerplate circuits any builder could design in a day. Wallis decided that was not fair to buyers and priced his utilities accordingly, so the parts everyone needs to make the exciting modules actually talk to each other do not blow the budget.

Takaab is not a solo project. The VLH module came out of a collaboration with British designer Steve O'Hear, and Wallis is now building a sequencer with Jim Grant, a retired lecturer in Music Information Technology at City University of London who helped prototype SMPTE timecode syncing for the early Akai S-series samplers. Siam Modular has also started stocking open-source PCB designs from Thai circuit designer Voxmachina, turning the one-man workshop into something closer to a distribution point for the country's whole modular scene.

Red Drum's Sound

Onstage, Wallis performs as Red Drum, and the hardware shapes the sound as much as any influence does. Chiang Mai Citylife describes his sets as "machine-driven techno-funkiness, marked with elastic acid, shattered breakbeats, energetic synth riffs and dubbed-up wobbly basslines, with plenty of ad-libbing and unpredictability to boot." Asked to sum up his own music in five words for Mixmag Asia, he offered: "Raw, electronic, funky, energetic and old-skool."

He has described the appeal of building the instruments himself in blunter terms. "There's that feeling you get when you create anything from base parts, that feeling of raw creation," he told Citylife. "When you first get that circuit going on the breadboard and start riffing with it, you realise you're conjuring that sound from the earth. You've just arranged some minerals in a certain order, and now you're using it to manipulate energy into something interesting, even beautiful. There's something very primal about it, akin to beating a hollow log with a big stick."

A Small, Perfectly Formed Scene

Siam Modular is not a solitary outpost. Chiang Mai's Eurorack builders, among them Daydream Devices, the duo Nguyễn + Transitory and DJ-producer Wuthichai, have gathered around events like the PLEXUS mini-festival at Deejai Garden, the kind of self-organised, warehouse-adjacent DIY night that rarely gets booked through a club calendar, trading modules and comparing patches in a city better known outside Thailand for its clubs and nightlife than for hardware design.

Wallis, an outsider by his own admission even after a decade in the city, sees the pattern clearly. "There's quite a history of experimental music here, and the Eurorack thing builds on that," he told Mixmag Asia. "People from outside Thailand are often surprised that there's a modular scene at all, but there is a lot of talent here, so there certainly is a scene, one that while perhaps relatively small is nevertheless perfectly formed."

Cover photo: Siam Modular, official product photo.