I've only read the first 4 pages of this thread so forgive me if this point has already been covered, but the one thing people seem to be missing here is that the transition from Jungle to 2-Step wasn't a seamless one. Circa 94-46 UK Garage was a solely four to the floor genre. The thing about 2-step is that it was embraced by those 4 to the floor DJ's & producers, not the drum & bass scene. That is why many people would say that 2-step evolved from 4/4 garage, not Jungle. But fair enough, that process would have never happened if Jungle didn't exist, after all, Garage was more or less House designed to appeal to London clubbers who unlike the Americans had a history of the whole arkcore thing.
When you think about the really early 2-step tracks, there were a handful. You had Tina Moore's 'Never Let you go', which was a US producer who was commissioned to do a few remixes of the tune and thought that for the B-side he'd do something a little different. He was very suprised when it was the obscure 2-step version that was getting the most airtime in the UK. Given his US location it could be assumed that Kelly G hadn't been exposed to D&B all that much. Then you have the Roy Davis Jnr tune 'Gabriel', again tooled by a Yank. 4 to the floor was his bread & butter but like Kelly G he consigned the strangest remix to the B side of his EP. Incidentally, Gabriel doesn't have a strictly breakbeat drum structure, as the kickdrum is effectively 4 to the floor but there is no 2nd kick.
Then you have the British producers. Dem 2's 'Destiny' is sometimes regarded as the first 2-step track. I don't know whether they have a history in Rave or Jungle, but they were stalwarts of the 4 to the floor scene back in the day when the idea of tunes not being 4/4 was unthinkable. SkyKap's 'Endorphins' was another early track, but I don't know anything about their history. There was also the First Steps (aka Groove Chronicles, of which El-B was a member) remix of N-Tyce's 'Telefunkin' track, which was notable for it's strong bassline. As far as I can work out, Groove Chronicles were making 4 to the floor stuff before this 2-step thing came out, though I don't know this for a fact. It's possible that this was El-B's first 'Garage' track, but discogs seems to suggest otherwise.
What I'm getting at here is that the importance of 4 to the floor garage has been overlooked in this continuum concept. Old Skool Junglists like Steve Gurley & Chris Mac (aka Potential Badboy) pioneered the 2-step sound, but the former probably had some involvement in the 4/4 garage scene before he went into the studio, and the latter probably was one of the breed of producers who came into garage direct from D&B.
Dont forget the foor to the floor!
Oh, and someone wrongly thought that Dubchild & Darqwan/Oris Jay were one and the same. Dubchild comes from Leicester and Oris is from Sheffield. I once herad them both speaking together on a radio show.
http://darksidesophistication.blogsome.com/
