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Music by Anonym

Play Ms Pac-Mondrian in a new window

Anonym and Ms. Pac-Mondrian decided to collaborate, and it was Anonym's suggestion that he score the map of Detroit, his home town and the birthplace of techno music. Growing up in tha D, his love for techno grew with him as he attended many of the legendary parties thrown by the second generation of techno masters like Richie Hawtin, Jeff Mills and the Underground Resistance crew.

He could only dance and listen so long before he had to make the beats himself. Anonym worked in demolition and was Inspired by the milieu of Detroit's decaying industrial base to create atmospheric techno that reimagines the abandoned factory as an echo chamber, teasing out the ghosts of a dying mechanical age to divert the traces of their productive energies to the politics of dancing.

His production work ranges from thick dubby stabs to sparse bleeps and bloops with a warmth throughout that celebrates the beauty and renewal possible in every system of decay. With several releases on his own Anonymous Release label and Pheek's netlabel Archipel, his music has been caned by top techno jocks Richie Hawtin, Ricardo Villalobos, and Luciano. In 2006 Anonym will emerge from the studio ready to rock the dancefloor with a Live PA.

For the Detroit Techno level, Anonym remixed the pounding piano of Albert Ammons, Meade Lux Lewis and Pete Johnson used in the original Pac-Mondrian game into stomping techno tracks that propel the percussive rhythms of boogie woogie jazz into the 21st century.

Check out Anonym's website to hear more deep funk broadcast straight from tha D.

view Detroit Techno map

The Detroit Techno level reproduces a cartographically exact map of downtown Detroit in the style of Piet Mondrian, and marks the birth of techno in the city.

The address of 1486-1492 Gratiot was known as Techno Boulevard. There the studios of Juan Atkins' Metroplex Records, Derrick May's Transmat Records, and Kevin Saunderson's KMS Studios took hold and pumped out intergalactic funk transmissions to the future. Launching the most successful cultural export from Detroit since Motown, the funk now had a raw electronic edge best described by May as what would happen if George Clinton and Kraftwerk met in an elevator.

In Detroit Techno you dash into the studios of Techno Boulevard and emerge at The Music Institute, the first club to play techno. DJ T-1000 put it best: "The Music Institute was Detroit's answer to such legendary house and garage clubs as New York's Paradise Garage and Chicago's Powerplant. At the beginning of this music, the MI was the only place you could hear Detroit Techno the way it ought to be heard: Loud. Bumpin. Funky."

The ghost house marks the 1st Precinct of the Detroit Police Department.

May 1, 2004
"so the day after the art opening [the first time the Pac-Mondrian cabinet was exhibited] i'm at work and my boss tosses my paycheque on my desk a week early meaning i now have funds to see kraftwerk if the concert hasn't happened already, having in my head forced myeslf to pretend it wasn't happening since funds and time went to art show. quick check of the internet and there it was 2.5 hours away.

lucky in my stash were e and shrooms awaiting such an emergency deployment so after picking up some weed from TempSoc [The Temperance Society] i went home to get the drugs and then to the concert at Ricoh Colliseum greeting the opening of Man-Machine in a great polydrug cloud. i have been going to raves and their gentrified offspring for 10 years now and i have never witnessed a spectacle like that. kraftwerk kicked pink floyd's ass for trippiness too.

they updated all their classic tracks with new excursions employing contemporary filters and processing so it was a juiced up way funkier dancefloor friendly version of all their best chunes. 4 guys on stage identical outfits all sprockets style 4 laptops giant screen behind them. second encore curtain lifts to "we are the robots" and there's 4 robots onstage who then "play" the laptops and perform a synchronised arm-dancing routine, followed by the third encore guys in fluorescent light suits that make a grid of their bodies with graphics of a green grid on the screen so that it really looked like they were floating in the middle of the tron grid playing the music. musique non stop, techno pop. i've seen lots of big spectacles for electronic music acts and kraftwerk is still the original and best and i don't care how geeky it is.

dancing like a mad man and being alone in a crowd that was composed of pasty middle age white folks was a bit unnerving on that much drugs (on CNE grounds, benji hayward anyone? he almost ruined the ability to go to concerts of my whole generation, my first concert being dylan and the spectre of benji brought up by my parents [benji took acid & drank coolers before a CNE Pink Floyd concert in the late 80s then drowned in Lake Ontario]) and so i followed a psychedelic policy of keep to myself avoid eye contact to cut down on confusing andor potentially bad trips encounters.

a bearded bespectacled dude tapped me on the shoulder and started talking to me and i'm having a lot of trouble understanding him because of the volume of music crowd noise and the inherent difficulties in processing language through a pharmaceutical filter of mashy e trippy fungus stupid pot. i gathered he was looking for weed and after having smelled the blunt i smoked at the beginning of the concert was looking for some for him and his friends who were from the states somewhere afraid of border guards.

i had a pipe packed with weed so to make things easy on me and him just gave it to him said have it with your buddies. he came back with the empty pipe and $5 and i said i don't want your money and he thanked me profusely in a way that made me feel a bit embarrassed and so i packed and smoked a bowl myself getting back to the dancing at hand. later i smoke another bowl and pack one for the americans and have a hard time focussing and stuff to find the guy, turns out after several furtive glances backwards I finally discover he is standing right behind me so i asked him to make sure he was the dude who asked me for pot and he started babbling about being sorry and this and that and i cut him off and said "just take it" handing him the pipe and he said, "Oh, thanks!" we ended up chatting and when they asked me if i could hook them up with a 20 bag or dimebag or something afterwards i decided as a citizen of a repressive anti-pleasure state it was my civic duty to share with our out-of-country guests the rest of my personal stash for free, so there were 2 girls and 2 guys and the ladies went back to the hotel and i went with the guys to my place in st. jamestown sherbourne & bloor & got the stuff before heading back to the hotel. We ended up smoking most of what I had left and I gave them the low-down on the Temperance Society, so they were set for the next day.

i figured it was a karmically good thing to do and also was feeling generous in celebration of my first home-town opening and also remembered all the times i've been in the states never risking carrying over the border how cool it would have been to meet someone who just gave me drugs. I also gave them the low-down on the local record stores and labels as much as I could, being a life-time punter and all. i don't even know if some of them existed anymore but I told them about Killer, Chair, Revolver, Dumb-Unit, Woodwork, and any others I could remember. Turns out the one guy is a techno producer [Anonym] and he said he's going to send me some music. He's from Detroit and we talked lots about different legendary parties he's been to and I gushed about Jeff Mills' Rings of Saturn project, a total conceptual masterpiece. Also talked to them about Pac-Mondrian and my desire to do something in clubs with the project, since it's all based on dance music."

June 4, 2004
"Met Anonym and crew on a brief stop-over in Toronto on his way back from Montreal for Mutek and Richie Hawtin's CTRL party. We had a few beers on the patio of the Isabella Hotel, and before I could even mention a possible collaboration between us, he asked me! I pitched him on the idea of creating new Pac-Mondrian levels based on the map of New York tracing the whole length of Broadway (inspired by the brilliant Pac-Manhattan). He said why not do Detroit, his hometown? When he left for Detroit I looked for a map and started the translation. This is a million times better than just bringing the cabinet to a club! Now we'll be able to plug the cabinet in to the mixer and the gamer becomes the DJ, mixing techno tracks created for maps of the dance scene. YES!!!!!"