The Amalgamation Choir, a Greek a cappella group led by Vasiliki Anastasiou, performed this original arrangement of the Giogros Kalogirou song “Η Κσενιτιἁ του Ἑροτα” (The Exile of Eros), beginning with a beautiful rendering of a foggy mountain top beginning to resound with the clamour of falling rain. Whispers of high mountain wind are accompanied by many palms rubbing together, the snapping of fingers and the popping of cheeks, the slapping of knees and the stomping of feet, a fully embodied conjuring of the rainstorm! The song then begins, with beautiful harmonies that stretch and contract in the unique polyphonic aesthetic frame of Greek and Eastern European singing traditions. The story sung is of a conversation that takes place between an eagle and a lone, withered pine tree growing on the mountain of Kykkos on the island of Cyprus.The eagle is thirsting for water, and upon seeing the lone tree, also thirsting and withered, he perches on a branch and asks; “who is the master of this spring who will not let even you drink?” The pine replies that this place is the spring of Eros, the god of love, who himself is mourning the separation of two young lovers. A young man of the mountain is awaiting the return of his beloved from foreign lands, and his heart is too sick to live. If the woman returns, the she and her beloved will return to the mountain and they when they drink from the spring of Eros once more, only then will the mountain bloom in flower and abundance.

This poetry of this song communicates the enmeshment of human and more-than-human desires, dreams, and lives. Imbalance and suffering in the lives of humans, when it leads to distraction and disregard for vital ecological forces, brings suffering also to the more-than-human creatures and landforms that they inhabit. The death of ecosystems is depicted here as a process that has everything to do with the choices that humans make and the situations in which we find ourselves. (source)