---Reviews of Snap Hands by Herv--- Leagues O'Toole, Foggy Notions, February 2004: In Dublin, we're digging ourself out of an avalanche of electronic music, and Jaysus, it's getting to be hard work. Nowadays there are more laptop chameleons than there are trained sound engineers, and that's saying something. Melody, narrative, pop composition and cohesion is all thin on the ground. Everyone's searching for the perfect bleep, yet most of the time all we can really hear is the incessant bleet of the pack shuffling along to the pretext of cold technology. About a year ago Herv busted out of nowhere with live Gameboy shows and a super creepy-crawly seven-inch called "Warmduscher" that minced the competition in its steady grinding path. On his debut album we find him playing off studied technology concepts against action-packed ideas. His songs are shape-shifting monsters, endlessly inventive, confounding, dramatic and, God forbid, entertaining. On "Corrective Action" he minces heart-pounding funk and syncopated snares with weeping violins and cello. One of the recurring ideas on this record is to embed these frenetic rhythms into these lush and serene string canvases, with the emphasis on creating something evocative as opposed to making some random, spurious statement. "Process Idea" sounds like The Incredible Bongo Band being brutally deconstructed and I keep thinking the next-door neighbour is banging on the wall. Oh no, that's just Herv f**king with us in the back of the mix. And what about the moment three-and-a-half minutes into "Pianowire" when he just launches into this hammering thump and sends you spiralling off into a completely different direction? That's Snap Hands all over – a myriad flow of sounds and an endless flow of contortion. 4/5 ------- Sam Bungey, Mongrel, Feb/March 2004: The last, mock-revelatory song title – "It's OK, I'm A Collage" – is a cheeky red herring, posted for anyone who thinks they've figured out what Snap Hands is. See, this album obviously wasn't made by a person, but it wasn't made by a collage either. It was made by a bunch of nymphs: some psychotic, some angelic, but all blessed with an extra-terrestrial musicianship that means they don't need instruments – every gesture creates music perfectly correspondent to its emotional intent. With their little computer bodies they made this album. Even with the Aphex Twin – so capable of making a sudden shot of melody seem like it's been immaculately conceived from out of a mess of megabytes and drum 'patterns' – you're aware, however distantly, of the weird chap banging away at his Apple Mac. Not a clue here. The medium that found a way to bring this joyful noise to us must surely be rewarded in kind for its interplanetary philanthropy. I say a national 'Herv' day would be a nice, humble gesture. 82% ------- Katrin Richter, Raveline, March 2004. (http://www.raveline – translated from the original German) Herv comes from Ireland and is inclined towards introverted sound-collages, nicely bleeping sound snippets, which tenderly crack and break together to form a larger whole. His album, which falls somewhere between Bpitch, Hoertest and Planet Mu, despite all abstractness is above all convincing, because Herv never alienates his audience. Rather, through the use of melancholic strings or, as in the case of "Boots", he lures you into it's frendly interior with lovely floating tones and snarling, spitting threads, where one stays for ages, owing to the total absence of hard beats, until the outside world lures again. 5/6. ------- Jim Carroll, The Ticket, The Irish Times, 26th Feb 2004: Electronic doodles of the giddy kind. Irish electronic twister Herv doesn't bother hiding his influences under a stack of squawks, squelches or squeaks but rather lets them go wherever the hell they want to. As a result, while the descriptive shorthand may be informed by those records which has spent a lot of time with – we're guessing Four Tet, Manitoba, early Orbital and Prefuse 73 – there's thankfully little to suggest that Herv is simply a diligent sum of those influences. Instead, this is electronic music with considerable width and depth, Herv's ears rather than eyes open for the next possibility, an album where the quest for interesting noises co-exists rather than supplants the search for melody. You'll find yourself drawn back to these rough rhythms time and time again. 3/5 ------- Paul Watts, Anorak, January 2004: Ewan Hennelly has been producing and performing under the Herv name for a few years now, and has established quite a reputation for himself as one of Ireland's top electronica artists. Now, after having a few compilation tracks and a 7" single (which recieved a good review from The Wire magazine), he's released his debut album. And it's very good: Herv has possibly the best feel for melody of any Irish electronic producer, and his beat construction can sometimes be astonishing. So there's no complaint with his songwriting abilities. What is an occasional problem, though, is the production: he tends to use too many of the same sounds too often, and the EQing sometimes ends up too trebly, giving some tracks a certain off-putting shrillness. However, this doesn't change the fact that the songs themselves are generally great. Most of the tracks seem at first listen to be somewhat naive and childlike, but there's an underlying experimentalism and restlessness to them which distinguishes the music from the ear candy which passes for electronica nowadays. But it's not all chin-stroking material; one of the best tracks on the album is the closer, the well-named "It's OK, I'm A Collage", which drops the experi- but keeps the mentalism for sheer stop-start gabba silliness. With Ambulance and Spectac also releaasing albums in 2003, it was already a good year for Irish electronica debuts; "Snap Hands" continues that trend. ------- (And last but not least, the final review. It's the only 'bad' review we've got, but it's really only fair that we include it.) Matthew Magee, i Magazine, Sunday Tribune, January 2004: It can only be imagined that this is the kind of music that people like to be seen to possess – certainly it's not a lot of fun to listen to. Herv, a Dublin-based electronic musician, makes sounds that are interesting to hear once, but give little actual pleasure. Sure, this is the seemingly adventurous use of non-music samples and weird leftfield sounds to make 'music', but if Herv is making a point that all music need not be tunes or made by instruments, it is a point well made long ago. What Herv doesn't do is make his experiment appealing enough, sticking resolutely to his own rules. ----------------------------------------------------------------- http://www.compactrisc.net – hello@compactrisc.net