Andrew Magill is telling ten stories of people living with AIDS in Malawi.
Friday at Memorial Hall, the album will be released during a night of live music and performances, telling the stories of AIDS through song.
The project is merging the interests of global health and music.
“Not everyone is infected, but everyone is affected by AIDS,” Andrew Magill said.
Magill said that nothing makes you immune to the power of the virus.
“AIDS is the great equalizer,” he said.
The team that traveled with Magill specifically cast vocalists to represent the personalities and characteristics of the stories of the men and women they were interviewing. He said quotations from the people interviewed are incorporated directly into the lyrics of the songs.
“The thread that connects these stories together is hope, this is not just an epidemic of fear and doomsday,” he said.
“A lot of other influential people can take his model into the whole world,” Peter Mawanga, a musician from Malawi who helped with the project said.
The profits from the CD will go to fund his organization, “Talent’s of a Malawian Child,” which attempts to combat the social problems that come with AIDS.
“The proceeds of this project are going to allow a lot of underprivileged children to go to school by engaging these children into musical programs — sort of like a scholarship,” Mawanga said.
John Hass, a UNC graduate, called himself the “documentarian” of the project. He said he followed Mawanga and Magill into the villages of the people in order to share their stories through film with the rest of the world.
“My experience with AIDS was very academic before I came to Malawi, but this was real life,” Hass said.
“AIDS was not the most important issue — it was learning that ultimately we are all people and there is less that separates us than you think.”
Magill said he began the project to put a face and a name with the statistics.
“I was upset because the general discourse of AIDS was statistics, but it is a very human experience and should be told in human terms,” Magill said.
Because the idea began his senior year at UNC, Magill said he could not imagine a better place to release the CD than UNC. He said exposing the students here is to expose the globally minded leaders of tomorrow.
Magill said the world needs to have a global conversation about AIDS because the disease is indicative of poverty and a lack of education.
Malawi public health has an adult population of 15 percent HIV positive. This percentage affects the entire world’s overall health Magill said.
Mawanga said AIDS cross-cultural relevance is reflected in the combination of Malawi and American instrumentalists and styles on the CD.
“The project is a way of showing what these two voices and sounds bring together and how much we have in common,” Magill said. “AIDS is still the same virus in both places.”
Magill said his favorite song tells the story of a two-week-old HIV positive infant that was barely holding on to life in an orphanage.
“That baby would not be able to tell its own story because it does not even have a way to make its voice heard,” Malagi said.
Magill said the image and moment in the room with the little life struggling with AIDS was powerful.
Mawanga will be performing as a part of Stories of AIDS tomorrow.
“My calling as a musician is to be a voice for the voiceless,” Mawanga said.
Mau a Malawi: Stories of AIDS in Africa will be at Memorial Hall Friday at 8 p.m. Admission is free.
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