Poodles & Flan: Act I is a tool, a meta-composer, a kind of "paramusic" browser. It combines self-similarity, serialism, stochastics and Burroughsian "cut & paste" to generate MIDI compositions that are bounded by a user-defined palette of musical parameters (e.g. tempo, scales, chord types, modifiers, orchestration, etc.). These compositions are full of wonderful polyphonic textures, eccentric rhythms and self-similar structures. They can sound like jazz, classical, avant-garde or ethnic - and sometimes not.