Aphex Twin has always contained multitudes, and in the two years since Richard D. James returned from his extended hiatus, we have been reminded not only how many different facets he has, but also how good he is at compartmentalizing them. Each of his last three releases has shone the spotlight on a different aspect of his identity. Syro, his comeback album, was a bold, virtuosic, big-tent statement in the vein of I Care Because You Do and the Richard D. James Album—a showcase of all his talents across a variety of rhythms, timbres, tempi, and techniques. The hermetic, atonal Computer Controlled Acoustic Instruments Pt2 EP featured James in his mad-scientist lab coat, going to town on MIDI-controlled player pianos and programming robotic gizmos to thwack at drums. And Orphaned Deejay Selek (2006-2008) EP gave us James—technically recording as AFX this time—in dancefloor destroyer mode, laying waste to the rave at 150 beats per minute.
Cheetah, his new EP, shows us yet another side—at first, you might even say a simpler one. The record's tempos are, for the most part, slower than on Aphex Twin’s last few records, and its beats are straighter. You might think that’s a bad sign; after all, much of James’ genius has always been his dizzying rhythmic dexterity. But James’ take on four-to-the-floor is not like other producers’ approach to the same cadence. Even here, his sense of swing is unparalleled; accents flick to and fro with abandon. Machine claps splash like Baka water drumming, and 32nd-note fills spill forth like bags full of ball bearings. Crucially, with his beats less busy, it has left James more room to focus on spine-tinglingly rich tunings and timbres. And that’s where Cheetah really stands out: To sink into it, preferably on good headphones or better speakers, is to be immersed in woozy, viscous frequencies far more vivid than you’ll find almost anywhere else.
That’s particularly true of openers “CHEETAHT2 [Ld spectrum]” and “CHEETAHT7b,” both of which trudge along at a torpid 100 beats per minute. Their titles reference a British electronics company called Cheetah that was active in the late ’80s and early ’90s; the particular instrument to which they pay homage, and which James presumably used to make them, is the Cheetah MS800, a short-lived digital synthesizer that has been described as “one of the most unfathomable instruments ever made.” (When Warp surprise-premiered Cheetah at Nashville's NAMM convention in late June, they displayed an MS800 under Plexiglas.) What makes the MS800 unusual is its wavetable technology—or, as described in the user manual, in a phrase Warp repurposed for *Cheetah’*s press release, “sounds programmed to sequence through changing waveforms as the note plays, giving exceptional movement and character to the music.”
You can hear and feel that mutability in action: The synthesizers in “CHEETAHT2 [Ld spectrum]” move with a slippery, sidewinding motion, and the phaser applied to the drums feels almost greasy. Those wispy, warbly qualities give it a creepy, vaguely gothic air that's reminiscent of the Cure’s Seventeen Seconds, which is certainly not a thing I ever expected to find myself saying about an Aphex Twin record. “CHEETAHT7b” uses some of the same sounds and melodies—both tracks, it seems, are variations on the same core material—and its synths give off an eerie, palpitating glow. It’s remarkable what different moods he can evoke from such similar sets of sounds: Where “CHEETAHT7” is calm and meditative, “CHEETAH2” rolls with a sly sort of swagger, like someone in wraparound shades driving a convertible very deliberately around the block, leering.
Two short, ambient sketches show off the MS800’s mercurial properties in even greater detail, but the centerpiece of the EP’s latter half is a pair of tracks whose titles reference the Sequentix Cirklon, a multi-track hardware sequencer that also turned up in the titles of two Syro tracks. Here, we’re back in slightly more familiar territory: Both tracks ride the kind of snapping electro rhythms that were common on Rephlex records throughout the ’90s; “CIRKLON1” plies the kind of naïve, winsome melodies that have been James’ stock-in-trade from the very beginning, while “CIRKLON3 [Колхозная Mix]” ropes some hyperactive slap bass into the mix. Both are case studies in beat-based electronic music in which no two bars are alike: they are wriggling dynamos, and wrapping your head around all their moving parts is a little bit like herding centipedes.
There’s one other aspect of James’ personality showcased on Cheetah: the archivist. He first revealed that side of himself in 2015, when he uploaded nearly 300 old demos to an anonymous SoundCloud account, and he continued in the same vein with Orphaned Deejay Selek, his first official release of vintage, previously unreleased tunes. Two of *Cheetah’*s core tracks, it turns out, were included in his monumental SoundCloud dump, under slightly different names: “CHEETAHT7b” (as “CHEETAH7 Teac”) and “CIRKLON3 [Колхозная Mix]” (as “CHEETAH3 Teac”). What’s striking about the versions included on the new EP is how much better they sound. They’re clearly the very same recordings as those that went up on SoundCloud, but the rough versions sound like they’ve been wrapped in a dozen layers of cheesecloth; they're flat and muffled where the polished versions boast the sharp angles and bright gleam of quartz crystals. When James uploaded all that material to SoundCloud, it seemed like he was washing his hands of it, throwing it out so that he could move on. But it looks like one more aspect of his personality intervened: James the obsessive-compulsive, determined to make one final pass at perfection. Lucky for us, too.
