''Cheetah'' is an

extended play An extended play record, usually referred to as an EP, is a musical recording that contains more tracks than a single but fewer than an album or LP record.

by British

electronic music Electronic music is a genre of music that employs electronic musical instruments, digital instruments, or circuitry-based music technology in its creation. It includes both music made using electronic and electromechanical means ( electroac ...

ian Richard D. James, released under the pseudonym

Aphex Twin Richard David James (born 18 August 1971), best known as Aphex Twin, is an Irish-born British musician, composer and DJ. He is known for his idiosyncratic work in electronic music, electronic styles such as techno, ambient music, ambient, and jun ...

on 8 July 2016 on

Warp Warp, warped or warping may refer to: Arts and entertainment Books and comics * WaRP Graphics, an alternative comics publisher * ''Warp'' (First Comics), comic book series published by First Comics based on the play ''Warp!'' * Warp (comics), a ...

. The name is a reference to

Cheetah Marketing Cheetah Marketing was a United Kingdom-based company that produced electronic music-related hardware products and software for home computer systems during the 1980s. They later changed their name to Cheetah International Ltd. Based in Cardiff, ...

, a British manufacturer of microcomputer peripherals and electronic musical instruments in the 1980s (such as the MS800 namechecked in two of the EP's track titles).

Release

In 2015, Richard D. James uploaded several tracks with names like "Cheetah3 Teac" and "CHEETAHT7" to his SoundCloud 'user18081971' account; these have since been removed. A flyer teasing the EP release was sent to various record shops in the UK in early June 2016. The flyer parodies the luxurious writing style of 1970s adverts. The album was announced on 9 June, with James tweeting a link to a website for the EP. The ''Cheetah'' EP was made available on vinyl, CD,

cassette Cassette may refer to: Technology * Cassette tape (or ''musicassette'', ''audio cassette'', ''cassette tape'', or ''tape''), a worldwide standard for analog audio recording and playback ** Cassette single (or "Cassingle"), a music single in the ...

and a digital download in various digital formats, including MP3,

WAV Waveform Audio File Format (WAVE, or WAV due to its filename extension; pronounced "wave") is an audio file format standard, developed by IBM and Microsoft, for storing an audio bitstream on PCs. It is the main format used on Microsoft Win ...

and

FLAC FLAC (; Free Lossless Audio Codec) is an audio coding format for lossless compression of digital audio, developed by the Xiph.Org Foundation, and is also the name of the free software project producing the FLAC tools, the reference software p ...

. A video for "CIRKLON3 �олхозная mix was released on 21 June. The video was James' first since the

Chris Cunningham Chris Cunningham (born 15 October 1970) is a British video artist and music video director, best known for his music videos for electronic musicians such as Autechre, Squarepusher, and most notably Aphex Twin on videos for "Windowlicker" and " ...

-directed video for "

Windowlicker "Windowlicker" is a song by British electronic musician Aphex Twin, released on 22 March 1999 as a single by Warp Records. The artwork for the single was created by Chris Cunningham, with additional work by The Designers Republic. Cunningham als ...

" in 1999 and was directed by 12-year-old Ryan Wyer. James and Warp commissioned Wyer to direct the video after James discovered Wyer's "epic1:40d Gaming"

YouTube YouTube is a global online video platform, online video sharing and social media, social media platform headquartered in San Bruno, California. It was launched on February 14, 2005, by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim. It is owned by ...

channel.

Reception

Metacritic Metacritic is a website that review aggregator, aggregates reviews of films, TV shows, music albums, video games and formerly, books. For each product, the scores from each review are averaged (a weighted arithmetic mean, weighted average). M ...

, which assigns a normalised rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, ''Cheetah'' received an

average In ordinary language, an average is a single number taken as representative of a list of numbers, usually the sum of the numbers divided by how many numbers are in the list (the arithmetic mean). For example, the average of the numbers 2, 3, 4, 7, ...

score of 74, based on 11 reviews. Writing for ''

Exclaim! ''Exclaim!'' is a Canadian music and entertainment publisher based in Toronto, which features in-depth coverage of new music across all genres with a special focus on Canadian and emerging artists. The monthly Exclaim! print magazine publishes 7 ...

'', Daryl Keating gave the album muted praise, calling it "fine but unremarkable, especially when pitted against the behemoths of his back catalogue."

Accolades

Track listing

All tracks were written & produced by Richard D. James. "2X202-ST5" is contained on the CD, cassette and digital download editions and is included as a download available with the vinyl editions.

Personnel

Credits adapted from ''Cheetah'' liner notes * Richard D. James – producer, writer * Beau Thomas – mastering *

The Designers Republic The Designers Republic (also tDR, and styled as The Designers Republic™) is a British graphic design studio based in Sheffield, England, founded in 1986 by Ian Anderson and Nick Phillips. They are best known for electronic music logos, a ...

– artwork

Charts

References

{{Authority control 2016 EPs Aphex Twin EPs Warp (record label) EPs