"A Garden of Earthly Delights" was a project spawned during a radio interview I did to promote "Etosha" my very first CD project. I was talking about fractals, and how I thought that someday music might be created which, instead of being based on repetitive patterns, would be a chaotic process demonstrating self similarity, with a more organic beauty.

A young guy named Bryan Winge called into the show and said he wanted to write some code to try to do just that. So we worked together for a few months using a Julia set algorithm with various data filters to generate music. This was all done on a Mac+.

The idea was to really make "Music". Something that actually made you feel something as opposed to an academic exercise at data sonification. I think we did succeed to a some degree. I am sure that someday in the far future the use of dynamic self similarity will be a popular composition tool.

We then orchestrated the data into a huge selection of synthesizers, did some very selective but spare editing, and recorded overdubs with human musicians. Chris Rhyne did some really great keyboard work. It is really a challenging trip to play with non-repeating music. I think he did it incredibly well.

Although there had been some very unmusical academic exercises in outputting fractal data to sound, Botanica was the very first to create "Fractal Music" as far as I know. In the years after this CD came out, composers as diverse as Elliot Sharp and Brian Eno worked with fractals.

I got to meet Benoit Mandlebrot, the father of Fractal Mathematics in person and I gave him a copy of this CD. He seemed completely unimpressed.