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 that "Bothy Culture" won Bennett many friends and marked him out as "a leading figure in the evolution of Scottish music," calling the album a "storming mix of Gaelic tradition, raw emotion and glorious, full-blooded dance beats." The album has been called "pioneering" by "The Guardian", and "groundbreaking" by the BBC, and by "The Scotsman". Readers of the "Scotland on Sunday" voted Bennett the winner of the 1998 Glenfiddich Spirit of Scotland Award for Music, while the album came close to earning a Mercury Music Prize nomination. In a retrospective review, Colin Larkin rated the album four stars out of