The Fall of the Astronauts

Musician and composer Munsha and I have been collaborating for a while, resulting in some of my favorite projects and studio sessions—always accompanied by the pleasure of new questions and challenges. Themes migrate and shift from the periphery to the center and back again, deepening their resonances, getting digested.

The work I’m writing about today, The Fall of the Astronauts, is Munsha’s latest release, now printed as a record after being written for and performed on stage in theatres across Germany.
It deals with psychiatry.

More specifically, it confronts psychiatric coercion and the common practice of reducing any deviation from behavioral norms to a deviance—something to be corrected and brought back into line. Overkill in psychiatric treatment.
Normal as standardized is a modern invention that has become so deeply rooted in our society it is now applied to humans—as well as to animals, plants, mountains, and rivers.
To function like a well-oiled machine, society tests and sorts its components, eliminates the defective pieces, and creates a standard of efficiency that certifies adaptation to the system.
Who cares if the extermination of diversity makes us weaker and will eventually kill us off.

I had the privilege of photographing the stage premiere of Alice’s Geschwister on my birthday in 2021. This is the name of the stage piece that precedes the album—its characters and story based on Carroll’s Alice, the notorious dreamer girl.
Munsha’s Alice is darker. She falls deeper. She crosses the stage dressed in a million disguises and spans the widest range of musical genres, only to emerge as a unified whole. Multilayered, multi-faceted, multidimensional—but unified nonetheless. Munsha’s musical hand and eclecticism are the red thread uniting all the Alices.

Alice is devoured by a system that claims to help her—claims to heal her from dreaming. She is abused, medicated into oblivion, chemically standardized, and then spat out again as a woman without a voice. Munsha’s voice tells her story throughout the record, jumping from dreamy instrumental pieces to frantic minimal music and back again, perfectly capturing the complexity of Alice’s—or anyone’s?—human condition.

When the record was released alongside the musical’s score, Munsha made me happy by asking me to shoot the cover photo. So how do we approach this variety of styles, this fragmentation that still aligns with a very clear theme and aesthetic—from a visual perspective? The answer was a studio session where we painted with light, multiplied Munsha, and shot long-exposure photographs.
Munsha herself appears on the cover—a disrupted, stretched-in-time version of herself.

The photos span several seconds, blending a single frame with the passage of time. Multiple poses become one image; multiple Munshas form a single, utterly non-industrial, non-repeatable identity. The cover graphics were created by the hand of Elisa Campagnaro and complement the image beautifully.

Below is the album cover and some more images from the session. The booklet comprises two more plus the complete lyrics in English and German. Thank you, Munsha, for a wonderful work.
Now go and listen.

Photos: September 2023