EvergreenTree

In my experience drumstep tends to just be a cross between dubstep and DnB, whereas half-time is usually just DnB but at half the tempo. Some of it almost could be considered hip hop instrumentals but with the sound design of DnB. The two groups in that scene that come to mind are Ivy Lab and SHADES, though lots of DnB and IDM artists have half-time tracks (voljum, Noisia, Chee, Kursa, Seppa, and so on).

If you haven't found him already, you might like Wintergatan. Martin Molin of Wintergatan is currently in the process of designing and building a successor to a marble machine instrument he built a few years ago and is extensively documenting the process through YouTube. He doesn't shy away from showing mistakes either and all of his videos are beautifully shot and scored (often with music by him). If you are interested in engineering of any kind, I would highly recommend watching the Marble Machine X series from the start. He learns (and thus teaches) a lot of valuable lessons in the process and it is really satisfying to see it all finally coming together.

There are already curses bindings included with python; urwid is intended to be a higher level console UI library (widgets, text input boxes, dialogues, etc).