About two weeks ago a friend of mine put me onto Take 5's new album "5 of Hearts," his first in over three years. The album is dense and rich, mining the moodier jazz moments of DJ Shadow's genre-collapsing "Entroducing" with a very deliberate focus on compositional precision. When you play the album straight through you may notice a seemingly boundless collage of everything from soul, blues, and old-school hip-hop, through to Boards of Canada-esque ambience. It's the Japan of soundscapes: densely populated, full of varied aesthetic and nuance, meticulous in its arrangement, and it's been in the works for a long time.

I wanted to hear Take speak about his album but, moreover, I wanted to pick Take 5's brain about his graffiti, his alleyway philanthropy on the east side, and the late Lee Matasi. I met him at the Knowledgeable Aboriginal Youth Advocacy building on Cordova and Columbia and we conducted the interview in the alley.

CHALKEDUP: So why the decision to release the album yourself?

TAKE 5: It's a combination of stubbornness and lethargy. I haven't shopped it around, I just dropped it on a couple people's laps, I don?t know why. I guess just wanted to put it out. I guess I was in a hurry to get it out and I also kind of wanted to start on something new, like this album is really a collection of the stuff I've been working on for the last three years. It really has a wide range of styles and I kind of want something that I'm going to put forward to a label to a bit more channeled and guided with a specific, more narrow range of genre because I was all over the board with this one. Which is cool - for listening, but I guess I'm a perfectionist and I always want to wait and send the next best thing, you know?

C: So three years of collecting material, quite a hiatus between the two albums. Were you turned off music for a while or were you just kind of scattered with all the different pieces you trying to put together or were you focusing on other art?

T: I guess what happened was that over such a period of time I wasn't concentrating on putting an album out 'cause there was no pressure from any labels for me to get something done. I just kept making stuff as I was going along and over the last three years I've really opened up to different genres of influence so that kept incrementally changing with my interests as far as what I was producing. So yeah, I guess it was just the time span over that last three years [that accounts for] such a wide range of stuff.

C: What are some of the influences and genres you?re toying with right now?

T: Presently? Well, I haven't really been making too much stuff but I'm gonna go with some really folky jazz - jazz and folk music. [Pauses] I don't know actually [Laughs]. I'm gonna go in a whole bunch of different directions again...I need to make some really banging shit which is not totally what I?m used to doing.

C: Like some clubbable shit?

T: Mmm, yeah. I need to make some bangers. And I'm cool with that but I also want to make some really mellow shit.

C: That's how I feel about 5 of Hearts, it's got a very mellow almost early Shadow-esque vibe - very "Entroudcing".

T: Yeah, I've heard a few people say that and it's not a conciosus effort because I never really listened to much of that but I guess it's one of those effects of the collective unconscious.

C: What's a great strength that's really powering "5 of Hearts"?

T: [Long reflective pause] The mood. The mood that it creates. It's like my heart on the table, right? It's really personal, it's a lot of my mood and how I see the world, so its strength is the mood that people can share with me when they listen to it. It's a window inside how I feel a lot of the time.

C: And a weakness?

T: I guess I would say lack of continuity because it's so broad. I mean I try to arrange them in an order that would seem mellifluous or flowing but I guess one of it's weaknesses is that it's not too congruous.

C: What is something you hope people will really get about the album? What's the one thing?

T: To answer your question in a holistic sense I would hope that it would inspire people as other great albums have inspired people to make something and be creative. On a song to song basis it's different. I hope people can realize the work that goes into the songs and pay attention to the detail because there's a lot of detail in the songs, there's a lot of textural work, there's a lot of little things that you can hear and there's parts of songs where there's only one part that's like that, and that's usually my favourite little part, you know? I hope people can find their own little favourite part in every song and like go "here it comes, here it comes, oh yeah there it is" and be ecstatic. I hope people can derive joy from it, I hope people can use it as a source of energy and inspiration?and I know that happens so it's nice to hear it from people when that transpires.

C: Hemochromatosis, the first track on "5 of Hearts", it's a condition in which you have too much iron in your blood and the song is composed entirely with train samples. I want you to talk about the significance of trains in your life and where that roots.

T: Somebody asked me this the other day and I was like what the fuck, I don't know. My affinity for trains came from the fact that I was painting them a lot in the nineties and I also took to riding them a lot, the freight trains. Also, I was injured in '95 in an accident with a train that left me paralyzed from the chest down and I also live right across the street from the train yard. It's like wherever I go, that's where the train is.

C: It's almost ingrained in your being in a sense.

T: It is, it really is an integral part of my life. I romanticize them, you know? I find it to be this vast ocean of metal that's rolling around with people's ideas on them. Also, in the sense musically, they're very symphonic. Living next to a yard is really an amazing thing 'cause there's always a different array and arrangement of sounds and tones and clashes and bangings and roars and screeches and whistles and bells and footsteps. So as far as that song goes I wanted to integrate what I hear every day and night out my window into the music. And it's really a tribute to my other passion which is graffiti art and which I have contributed largely to the freight painting scene - and riding.

C: That's a good segue actually, I was going to ask you about your graffiti. I mean, it's been how many years of doing art and traveling to and fro on the rails and getting involved in the graffiti community? Talk about graffiti a bit for me.

T: Well, I've been doing graffiti for about fourteen years. I grew up in a smaller city where there wasn't any graffiti happening at all. This was pre-internet, pre-magazine publication of graffiti so for me as a young artist to get any influence or inspiration I had to go to the train yard and hope and pray that something beautiful would roll by that I could shoot with my camera. This was a time in the freight movement where graffiti had pretty much just emerged within ten years of being on freight trains so it wasn't as ubiquitous as it is now. You can look at a line now and guaranteed see a painting going by--guaranteed numerous paintings going by--and back when I started there was nothing. So, I was always frequenting the yards to find inspiration and to learn because I had no mentors at the time that was a big part of my introduction into the world of hip hop was through graffiti and then eventually I decided to take up music after my accident. It was a very natural progression from doing graffiti to getting into turntablism and then producing and it's all under the umbrella of the hip-hop culture.

C: How did Lee Matasi's passing change the scope of the album?

T: It was before he passed away that I really felt any influence because I was working on this album. I was just cranking out tracks, I still have so many songs that no one's heard, and he would come over to my apartment and I would play him stuff. I'd be making stuff that day and he'd come up and I'd still be working on it and he would just sit there and listen. He was very keen on what I was doing, he would sit there with his head in his lap and shake his head. He'd be really blown away by what I was doing and it was so important for me to know that I had fans and friends like him that really dug my stuff and that really encouraged me to keep making more stuff. Like, sometimes I wouldn't know what direction I wanted to go in and he'd come over and be like "no, no, this is the one, this is the shit" and he'd just sit there and freak out. He was pretty much my number one fan, I drew so much energy from those visits that we had when he would come over and just listen. So I released the album after his death and I dedicated it to him just in the memory of those times that we shared in my apartment. Just a little short story: He also had my first album and he took it to France and all across Canada, it was one of his favourite CDs. I'd given him a CD of my stuff that nobody had, so he had my album before anybody did, and it was kind of like my secret gift to him. Anyway, he was traveling across Canada in his van and I was hitchhiking because the train ahead [of the one I was riding] derailed. Long story short, Lee's van pulls up and he's playing my tunes, man. He'd been rocking my CD all the way across Canada and his girl was like "I want to meet this guy and he was like "well here's your chance, he's right there on the side of the road"." [Laughter] Just one of those serendipitous moments. So we shared a lot of connection like that.

C: How do you feel about having lived on the east side here for so long and spending so many a night sharing your love with street involved people - why is that important to you?

T: Well I guess it's part of my practice of trying to change the world, you have to do it one step at a time, one person at a time. A lot of people will step outside their door and say "this world's fucked up and I can't do anything" or they'll feel helpless but at the same time they won?t take the time to know their neighbours, they won't take responsibility for the people in their community, and that's why people fall through the cracks and suffer and die. We're so isolated and separate and we don't have a clan or a community anymore we're totally separated.

C: No tribe.

T: Yeah, the lack of the tribe, the lack of the community is what's responsible for all this shit under the umbrella of the ultimate oppressing force of poverty. I think it's important that we realize the truth in what the Dalai Lama says about compassion: we need to love everybody equally. That is to say that you would love a stranger as much as you would love your brother or you sister or your mom or your aunt. So just to give those people a little bit of yourself whether it be through your interest or through your attention, or maybe it's a hug maybe it?s a cup of coffee. Whatever you do to acknowledge that person has tremendous value because it affirms them and lets them know that they're not alone and that we?re not separate and that is the illusion. That illusion is what's leading us to all this chaos and suffering and if we realize that we are not separate, that we?re all basically the same and we all have the same needs then we can be in solidarity and we can transcend our suffering and find importance and meanings in our daily lives.

C: A last word?

T: As far as last words to anyone out there listening, be yourself, and STAY ON TOP OF YOUR GOALS. If you get sidetracked don't beat yourself up for it, don't buy into the guilt and the fear, stay on top of what you want to do 'cause if you stick your mind to it you can do anything you want. I came from a very dark place of suffering from my accident where I thought my whole world was going to collapse and I found hope after that through my creative endeavors. So stay positive, and stay centered, and be creative and be true to your creative intuition, and be responsible to your passion. Responsibility to passion.

Bradey Iles, 19 June 2006<br> Check out more <a href="http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendID=4711855">Take 5</a>