I've gotten swept up this winter in Andy Stott's relatively glacial "knackered house" on
Passed Me By and
We Stay Together. Even before I really immersed myself in those, I was realizing that I prefer 4x4 at slow tempos, from maybe 85 up to 110 bpm. A kick every beat fills a lot of sonic space, so spreading them out further than usual provides better rhythmic balance, I think, than the normal 120-130 house/techno range. Relatedly, as every producer and DJ seems to have remarked at some point or other: the more space between primary beats, the more room for syncopation, swing and bounce. And, as others have noted, the 100bpm region is inherently very nice for dancing. All the 4x4 I've been making for a while has been 108 or slower, and all I really want to listen to these days is slow, blackened dub techno.
Side note on
Passed Me By and
We Stay Together: to me there's an intriguing timbral resemblance in places to Dabrye's
Two/Three Instrumentals (one of those ear-expanding albums for me when I discovered it about 5 years ago, my first experience with the Dilla continuum), nowhere more so than
"Intermittent."