In December we told you about the Safe and Sound Song Competition where Belizean artists were invited to submit songs to promote awareness about HIV and Aids. There were 43 entries but only 16 made it on the CD sampler and only one won the top prize. The winners were Normando Esquiliano and Denzil Armstrong who together form the group: Mix Vibez. Their winning entry was “knowledge is the key.” The announcement was made at a concert in Dangriga on Wednesday night and yesterday Normando and Denzil came to our studio to sing their winning entry for us.
Denzil Armstrong, Mix Vibez
“It is called ‘knowledge is the key’ and the basis of it is prevention, protection. So we start off by saying we try to prevent it first and then protection afterwards. So through the song we try to hit all the areas whereby we can educate the youths like ourselves who are in the situation.”
Normando Esquiliano, Mix Vibez
“The toughest challenge was finding the appropriate beat for it. So we tried to find a background that at the same time was uptempo but at the same time it can spread the message and once we found the beat it took us overnight to right the track and record it at our studio in Orange Walk.”
Denzil Armstrong,
“Hopefully everybody can get the message about HIV prevention and then protection because we say a lot of things, for example in this song we say 26 people died from swine flu and everybody wants to wear a mask but 2 million people died from Aids and barely anybody wants to wear a condom. So we hope people can understand where we are coming from.”
Sebastian Voelker, Organizer
“All songs are about HIV and it is all about awareness, educating the people and the most important thing is just to try to help awareness through music and we think it is a good thing to spread the message about HIV awareness. It is all about spreading the message and the CDs”
Three thousand copies of the CD sampler have been produced and they are available for free at the National Aids Commission or listen to online at safeandsound.de.
