Fred Again

Not a single one of his ten sits in a fire sign. Four are in water, three in earth and three in air, so the chart has feeling, structure and description and none of the element that simply starts things off. Fred Again is on record as an English producer who turned voice notes into dance records, a trade built out of material that was never recorded in order to be music. Hearing the song already inside somebody's speech is water and air work rather than fire.

The Sun and Moon sit conjunct within a fifth of a degree, both on the twenty sixth degree of Cancer, with Mercury six degrees behind them in the same sign. That is a birth at the new moon, where the public and private halves of a chart occupy one point and there is no distance between them to report from. Cancer keeps whatever it is handed, and a catalogue assembled out of saved voice notes is that instinct given a hard drive.

Mercury sits directly opposite Uranus one hundredth of a degree from exact, which is as close as the arithmetic ever puts a pair, and opposite Neptune as well at a third of a degree. Speech under pressure from the planet that disrupts and the planet that blurs, simultaneously, is a striking thing to find in the chart of a producer whose raw material is a recording of somebody talking. Five of the ten stood retrograde at his birth, Mercury among them.

Saturn stood once more on the Aquarius degree it started from, on 28 February 2023, at twenty nine, from the twenty ninth degree of the sign and running backwards at both ends of the lap. Saturn asks what the first thirty years actually built. For a producer who had already turned a private archive into public records, the answer was on the shelf before the question arrived, and Aquarius is the sign that supplies it in a form nobody requested.