PREMIERE: Salamanda - the blue wine [Music To Watch Seeds Grow By]

Seoul duo Salamanda. Uman Therma (Sala) and Yetsuby (Manda) have turned their gaze to the most unassuming of subjects: a single basil plant on a windowsill There once was a Basil who sat in the dusk, When the light had gone thin and the day shed its husk, He gazed at the glass where the garden grew small, And pondered his fate in the last of the hall. A wine of deep blue in a vessel unclear appeared on the sill as the midnight drew near, The Basil regarded it, leaf pressed to pane, And thought several thoughts that he couldn’t explain. Does he know? said the snail, who was still on the glass, That all things must come, as all things come to pass? The Basil said nothing, but widened one arm, And accepted the evening with dignified calm. In Seoul, two small people called Sala and Manda Composed from the windowsill, neither meander, They caught the blue hour and the wondering mind, The fate that all well-tended basils will find. Oh Basil, oh Basil, you left-of-centre thing, With your atoms and rituals and quiet suffering, You lived your full day from the sun to the dark, And went out, like blue wine, without even a mark. Music To Watch Seeds Grow By, returns for its eighth entry with Seoul duo Salamanda. Uman Therma (Sala) and Yetsuby (Manda) have turned their gaze to the most unassuming of subjects: a single basil plant on a windowsill, tracking its full day from morning light to whatever it is basil dreams about after dark. We’re premiering the album’s closing track, ‘the blue wine’, a final mysterious reverie in which the basil seems to contemplate its own fate, somewhere between acceptance and wonder. It is the still point at the end of the day: the light gone, the snail departed, the photosynthesis done. What remains is something like thought, or the plant equivalent of it. Manda puts it well: does the basil know what it’s for? Would it resist, accept, or even feel something close to joy? ‘the blue wine’ doesn’t answer that. It just sits with the question, which is probably the right thing to do… @8salamanda8