Atif Aslam

Fire takes five of his ten planets and earth none at all, along with three in water and two in air. Earth is the element that would hold any of it to a fixed shape, and its complete absence in a chart this hot is the first thing worth noting. Aslam is a Pakistani singer and among the most streamed artists in his region, which is a reach counted across borders rather than inside one.

The Sun sits at twenty one degrees of Pisces, the sign with no edge of its own, while Jupiter, Uranus and Neptune group across twenty degrees of Sagittarius. Pisces absorbs and Sagittarius travels. For a singer whose voice carries across several countries that do not always agree with each other, those two signs between them describe the whole working position better than any amount of earth would.

Mercury sits square Uranus at under half a degree, speech braced against the planet that refuses the expected arrangement, and the Moon makes a quintile to Jupiter at just over a degree, which is an easy skill with scale rather than a struggle for it. Saturn and Pluto were the two retrograde planets, so the heavy end of the chart faces inward while everything personal runs forward. For a singer whose records cross several borders, speech braced against the planet that refuses the expected is where the distinctiveness comes from.

On 26 December 2018 Jupiter stood again on its Sagittarius birth degree, when he was thirty five. That is the planet of reach returning to the sign it governs, as unobstructed a lap as the arithmetic allows, and Sagittarius counts distance covered rather than depth. Three circuits precede it, and the reach the record describes was built across the second and third. With no earth at all, none of that reach came from a plan; it came from a voice that travelled further than the industry around it could organise. Jupiter sits conjunct Uranus within a degree and a half, which puts the planet of reach next to the planet that refuses the expected, and in a performer that pairing tends to mean arriving where nobody had planned for you.