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 THE FALL OF THE ASTRONAUTS 

An out-of-the-box soundtrack for theatre

* Out on June 5th 2025 *

Available on Bandcamp and online music stores
Pre–order starting on May 15th

UPC/EAN: 5063248542010 // Format: Digital

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All songs written, performed, and produced by Daniela Lunelli aka Munsha at Farf Studio Berlin for the music stage play »Alices Geschwister«.

Mixed by Lorenzo Maffia (2, 5, 14); Galdieri (6, 7, 11); Ilia Gorovitz (12); and Munsha (1, 3, 4, 8, 9, 10, 13) // Mastered by Valerio Massucci at Hypertone Studio (Berlin)
 // Karoline Stegemann (voice in 3) // Frank Korn (German quote in 5) // Artwork: Anna Motterle // Graphic design: Elisa Campagnaro
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Thinking of Annamaria Sciarpapell Grosso
and all those who fight against psychiatric coercion.

A special thanks to Susanne Chrudina, Franz Hanemann, Mi_Mo, Martina Bertoni, Matteo Lodola, Lucia Lamberti, Geri Hahn, Aurora Kellermann, Chris Wohlrab and TATWERK | Performative Forschung.

„A warning sounds irreparably as I groom the two heads of a blue dog; from an overturned sky, a swing on the sea; my mind is a diamond filled with gunpowder.“

Friday, 08:05 AM.
I’m late again today. Get up!

All these faceless faces are making noise without saying anything. What an immense waste! Sticky mouths wide open: they should turn them into planters. I’m going to the bathroom to shout.

„ An EVA suit provides approximately 6 to 8.5 hours of life support, with emergency reserves that can add another 30 minutes to an hour.“

01:46 PM.
Still alive and out at last. I smuggle my hour of fresh air from high school to the conservatory in a pack of Lucky Strike – if my singing teacher knew…
A piano vomits mothball harmonies into the room: the stench of polished adult-new melodic pop of someone imitating someone trying to imitate someone else. Pleeeease knock it off! Benedetto Marcello is looking for a place in my daily routine – between one backcombing and the next.
He approaches me with the stance of a mobster and the skill of a wooden fruit box salesman: „Not for you!“ The other me answers proudly, Fuck you!

7 km of the seafront at sunset, between Schumann’s Op. 129 and Weather Report. The music’s already humming through my Walkman, the headphones still hanging around my neck.
Sunday, 49:71 D.C. In the cosmic void, an astronaut drifts in silence, tethered to the strings that keep him alive. The isolation of space echoes like a cluster forced into a corner: A distortion trapped by the demands of a world that insists on dictating its metrics… The path home becomes a distant memory, a new journey.

Grevday, 01:08 AM.
 There is a me before and a me after. For a time, we brushed against each other, observed from afar, brazenly avoided like consecutive fifths. How long have I been lost in space?
Where I come from, there is much to loathe and little to do, and the blue dogs fade. I don’t want to be a planter!

The Fall of the Astronauts revolves around the theme of psychiatric coercion as a tool of censorship – not as a cure, but as a weapon in the hands of those in social, cultural, and political power to stifle dissident voices and exploit the vulnerable.
Through its dramaturgy the theatre play stands up for the right to multiplicity, to being bizarre, to stepping out of the chorus – but not simply as a idle cry for ‘individual freedom’, but as an act of resistance to a culture that attempts to crush diversity and level everything under its cloak of homogeneity.
Likewise, the album is an act of creative independence, a multifaceted production that arises from an ethical standpoint, rejecting the boundaries of both market and genre, serving as a tour of the human condition and experience.  

WATCH THE MUSIC STAGE PLAY »Alices Geschwister« (German with English and Italian Subtitles)

Let me tell you a story.

During the pandemic, thanks to some extra time and resources, I finally gave shape to a project I had in mind for years: staging my impression of a specific aspect of the psychiatric world: coercion.
I do not belong to those suffering from mental illness, but I had an early experience that led me to dig into the matter.


My name is Daniela, but almost everyone calls me Munsha.
This story seems centuries old. It was the 1990s, and I was just a teenager.

I had put aside my classical music studies (later I found out they were only on pause), feeding myself on Rock ‘n’ Roll and cursed poets. I played electric bass and had a couple of bands with whom we occasionally performed in the clubs of a rather bourgeois town in Campania.

I have never been a person of many words – even fewer back then.
When I wasn’t wearing black, green baggy army trousers and a Che Guevara T-shirt were my attire. Audio cassettes instead of nail polish, cigarettes instead of Cola One: these were my investments.

All this in the setting of a Liceo Socio Psico Pedagogico populated almost exclusively by female students.

In there, I was a creature of my own.

And there was this little woman: my humanistics teacher.
Even in her eyes, I was out of place. Not because of the place, but because of who I was. Her attitude towards me was anything but educational, despite the pedagogical orientation of the institute. Today, we would call it „mobbing.”

We were in a subtle conflict – or rather, she was against me, with unfairly low grades and denigration. I swallowed my daily five hours in the classroom, waiting to get back to doing what made sense to me.

Then, one day, this little woman with an enormous megalomania stopped me in the yard on my way out of school.
My fingers were fondling a cigarette that had slipped out of the pack I kept in my pocket; music was already belching from between my collarbones and chin.

In a firm voice with no cadence to a question mark, she asked „What’s wrong with you?”
The usual discomforts a teenager can experience, I thought, but I didn’t tell her.

She got close to me – too close. As usual, she pulled up one corner of her mouth – a bad imitation of Billy Idol – and lifted her chin to impose herself, exercising her authority.
„The problem is in your head, and you make trouble for others. You need to be treated,” she thundered. „I will request the headmaster to have you seen by a psychiatrist. To me this sounded like: We will lock you up!

She had threatened me and she did it in the worst way: with an attempt at censorship. Despite her role, she did not try to listen to me or offer me help. No, straight away she brought up psychiatry.
Yes, I had already messed up a bit with my rebellious crap, but it was youthful frustration I had to spit out, not a mental disorder. This episode just increased my anger!
Fortunately, her intimidation did not materialise; I hope it was only because she spoke without thinking.

This one incident, however, gave me food for thought, a lot, and for a long time.
I felt deeply disturbed by that power game in which, if one is fragile, one either loses or escapes by luck (as in my case).
Prompted by this reflection, I began searching for answers to helplessness and existential precariousness; I found only evidence that supported my astonishment, which turned into disillusionment.

I delved into history, letters, archives, medical records, biographies, and scientific texts. I drew from it stories of political, social, racial, gender, or class coercion, private interests, poverty, ignorance, and fear. Lifes censored, silenced, and politically exploited. Individuals shunned, pushed to the margins, mocked, lost in the oblivion of a „cure.”

I evoked some of them, perhaps a little naively, in a script and its soundtrack – the one that now takes the first step towards emancipating itself from the darkness of a drawer.

Sincerely, Munsha

VOYAGE on May 15th on Bandcamp and online music stores

As I thought about “Voyage”, I recalled long car journeys with my family, listening to music from the car radio or my Walkman.

This song is the one that opens the dramaturgical tale of the stage play.
“Voyage” expresses the lightness of youthful experience, the naivety of expectation, the unsuspected resolution of the journey. Alice or Lacie, the protagonist of this story sings (or listens?) about herself and her bizarre inner world, from which she is unsuspectingly taking leave, as she embarks on the bitter experience of institutionalisation.
Jazz plays an ambivalent role, as it triggers in me a familiar, intimate, cosy feeling, but at the same time a kind of mysteriousness and smoky unknown: a duality like a sharing in solitude, just as I immersed myself in music during those journeys as a child.

THE DAZE from April 30th available on Bandcamp and online music stores

It has been a while since the finalisation of my last soundtrack and its release.
With this first track, my forthcoming album The Fall of the Astronauts takes its step towards emancipation from the blackness of a drawer.
The daze is a sparkling impulse to rebellion; it is an ironic criticism of careless thinking in the frame of involuntary hospitalizations.
Today, a journey begins. I am excited and drained at the same time because of all the tasks behind a DIY release campaign, which are immense.
I cannot imagine having done this without the contribution of many friends and colleagues and the support of all of you curious music devourers.
Enjoy The daze!