From the Bandcamp blog: Drum and Bass Not Dead

Laurent Fintoni

DJ, label owner, and writer for FACT magazine

Drum and bass is not the dominant electronic music powerhouse it once was, but it is enjoying a revival and several key drum and bass labels recently joined Bandcamp. In addition to making tons of back catalog available digitally for the first time, labels like Exit, Soul:R, Astrophonica, and Cosmic Bridge, and artists like Marcus Intalex, Fracture, Neptune, and Fanu, are also pushing the genre forward, releasing new music and working on new mutations of the genre.

When the rave scene first exploded in the mid-1980s, its original musical foundations were set in acid house and techno. But over the course of a decade, rave music splintered, dominant sounds and their beats per minute (bpm) diversified, and new electronic subgenres flooded dance floors. Most house music bumps away around the stately 120 bpm mark, as established by the disco genre that came before it. As the first decade of rave wore on, producers and DJs became increasingly fascinated with the use of breakbeats – sampled drums that had been more commonly associated with hip-hop production until the early 1990s – and a more uptempo style known as jungle techno arose. As jungle developed, the tempo of breakbeats were pushed up past 140 bpm, eventually settling somewhere between a manic 160 and 170 bpm. The rapid-fire, breakbeat-heavy genre would become known more simply as jungle, before ultimately morphing into drum and bass.

To read the rest and check out some really cool drum 'n bass, hit this link:
http://blog.bandcamp.com/2014/07/15/drum-and-bass-not-dead/