Bothy Culture a result of his experiences of the early 1990s Glaswegian rave and house scenes and his experimentation with numerous types of world music. It was recorded solely by Bennett within his home studio. Bennett explained "Bothy Culture" celebrates not only his own country's Gaelic culture and music, but also the music of Islam, for which he held a long-lasting fascination due to its vocals, modes and instrumentation being "similar in emotion" to Gaelic music styles, and the music of Scandinavia, which he found to have the same heavy-beat rowdiness and "solitary sweetness" of the ceilidh music he played in his
Bothy Culture upbringing. He felt he understood Islamic and Scandinavian music as soon as he heard them due to them expressing themselves without words: "I recognised them to be some past life I had lived through perhaps, or they seemed to well up under my fingers without my awareness." The album is named for bothies, the Highland huts where travellers and shepherds would traditionally meet, rest, swap tunes and party. Bennett had stayed in bothies when trekking the Highlands, and had over time taken note of the bothy songs and tunes written by shepherds and drovers over generations, and noted similar traditions