Arlyn is a musical venture on the part of Arlyn Matthew Whittington Culwick (born 22 June 1982) aimed at creating an expression of folk music within a current contemporary idiom, described as ‘folk-minimalism’, in order to bring a conception of the value and transcendental importance of essential elements of folk into clear and relevant public expression. Arlyn has performed throughout South Africa, notably having toured with Magna Carta in September 2007^[1][2] and in July 2008,^[3][4][5] and has yet to release a debut album (to date, Arlyn has released a debut single, ‘Young but Growing’, made available exclusively at live performances for the miniscule price of R10.00, as a post-Capitalist marketing experiment).^[6] Despite this fact, Arlyn is a notable proponent of the emerging South African new-folk scene, both as a performer^{[7][8][9][10][11]} and as a promoter.^[12]

Folk-Minimalism is an essentialist project with regards to folk, as it is based on a cluster concept of ‘folk’ that identifies it centrally with themes such as innocence, mythicality, and kenosis. However, it is loosely eclectic in its relation to contemporary musical genres and styles, using elements of old folk, 70’s melodic rock, indie rock, and jazz, brought together under a unifying principle of ‘minimalism’.

Minimalism, in this case, is a method of abstraction by which any element of a piece of music that does not make a positive and distinct contribution to the meaning of the piece is removed, and all elements that remain in a piece are refined until they express their essence as accurately and fully as they are able to. This unifying principle is intended to give the essence of folk its fullest and purest expression within the genres indicated, hence the term ‘folk-minimalism’.^[13]

Arlyn’s concept and vision of folk is expressed poetically, but fully in the following monograph^[14] (For a general overview of folk music, please see this article instead).

The Beautiful Something:
There is a beautiful something, somewhere far away, and it’s lost and alone and missing, and we are all the culprits. Our institutionalised modernity, our calcified, rationalised living, alienates us from ourselves – from the unbound, unmediated, living soul of humanity – so that we only see it as something mysterious, strange, even mythical.
We live on the encrusted edges of ourselves, on the residue, the stalactites and stalagmites deposited by the stream of living water that flowed in us in more innocent times. We are the arthritis-infested skeletons of civilisation, fusing all our joints, swallowing up tissue and nerve, suffocating the liveliness and life that brimmed over in youth.
And all the while, silently and all-but-forgotten, a voice whispers a neglected pleading, and we all know it, secretly. The sternly silenced murmuring of conscience, deemed silly, unfashionable, intolerable in the face of culture, becomes calloused, numb, alienated, dead. The naïveté of childhood, silly and vulnerable, easy prey for sharks and alligators, is rapped on the knuckles and instructed to toughen up, take it on the chin, to become world-wise, streetwise, and, in essence, calculatingly selfish. The ineffable mist of spirituality, elusive, represented in the child-painted brushstrokes of cultural construction to produce theology, liturgy, and cosmology, is lost under the noise of logic and ‘progress’, and is declared archaic, defunct, ‘untrue’ (in their linear way), and – irony of ironies – dangerous.
Everything is ‘dangerous’ to cultural totalitarians. Life is a biological hazard. And the fundamentalists and the liberals alike have declared war on it, and aligned to culture’s promise to construct a total reality in our image, a transcendental golden calf. (All that is left now is their race for market domination.) You horrid crustaceans! Your shells are too heavy; your armour will suffocate you. You will leave us immobile and idolatrous, and as lifeless as a concept. The last few thousand years’ project of moving towards the creation of a hyperculture will give you what you wanted: a universe made safe, controlled, self-contained and insusceptible to the ravages of God and disease. But it is a world devoid of soul; a mere copy, a counterfeit, a mirage. It can only exist by floating beyond the stratosphere, miles away from a river to water it and fields to feed it. It will live like a hallucination and it will die like the fading memory of a dream. And then we will find that God has long fingers; that the universe of total-culture is not quite beyond his grasp, and that idolatry does indeed have its punishment. Uproot yourself, and expect to wilt.
But somewhere, echoing in the patterns of thought and in the contorted memory of culture, that voice will continue to call. After judgement and the ensuing chaos, it will whisper its longing to us, and if we have a shred of love, we will listen. It is an invisible sea, right above our heads, waiting for the signal to fall. And when (if) it does, life will explode in all its wild, anarchic innocence, strange and mercurial, a flood destructive and live-giving, all-consuming and all-illuminating.
It is in an evening spent lying under the stars, alive to the world and – for once – devoid of intentions, that spirit creeps in. It is in a moment of strange recollection of something nameless and beautiful that innocence is remembered. It is in an act of kenotic martyrdom – of love that transcends self-interest – that conscience leaps up from the dead, singing of a joy hitherto unknown and inexpressible, full of the utmost moral beauty. And it is in the resurrection-experience of myth that life is transfigured, the boundaries of sense hurdled, and otherwise inconceivable realities glimpsed at.

All that is worthwhile is innocence in its unblemished simplicity, love in its anarchic kenosis, and spirit in its utmost, humbling transcendence. And these things will remain. Reality will not be toyed with. Man will be rid of his idolatry. And life will not die. Welcome to the innocence of myth…