Long before taking on the name tofubeats and navigating through the world of J-pop, Yusuke Kawai recorded under the name dj newtown. This project found the electronic artist creating jittery breakcore tracks out of a wide array of samples, inspired in part by his very own upbringing in a Kobe adjacent ''new town,'' a sort of planned suburb in Japan occupied by big box stores and not much else. Early releases popped up on Maltine Records and served as some of that netlabels finest offerings, combining sliced-up samples of anime music or Kawai's own Auto-tune-glazed singing over galloping beats.

Plenty of these sonic elements appeared in tofubeats' music over the next decade, but the dj newtown project itself went quiet in 2011, save for some sporadic live gigs. Yet eight years later, dj newtown returns with WEST MEMBERS, an all-new album featuring an extra layer of intrigue - every cut here samples a tofubeats' song from the past decade, including ones as recently as last year's Run. It's not just a throwback, but a chance to approach his tofubeats work from a new angle too. -- otaquest