Gotye

Three planets in earth, three in air, two in fire and two in water, which is as even as a chart gets. Gotye is a Belgian Australian singer and the record names one song, an enormous international hit built on two voices disagreeing about the same relationship, which is an unusual structure for a record that large.

The Sun sits half a degree into Gemini, barely over the line from Taurus, with Mercury further along the same sign. Gemini is the sign of the two accounts of one event, the conversation that will not resolve. For a song constructed as a duet in which neither party concedes, having identity and speech both stationed in the sign that holds two positions at once is about as direct a reading as this project offers.

Mars, Jupiter and Saturn group across nineteen degrees of Virgo, which puts drive, scale and limit together in the sign that corrects. The Sun sits square Jupiter at just over two thirds of a degree, identity against the planet of expansion, which in somebody whose reach arrived suddenly and in one piece is the friction worth noting. Four of the ten were retrograde, all of them slow. For a musician whose reach arrived in one piece rather than by degrees, identity set against the planet of expansion is the friction worth naming.

On 16 August 2015 Jupiter stood again on its Virgo birth degree, when he was thirty five. Virgo checks rather than enlarges, so the planet of reach is asked there whether the thing survives inspection, not how far it went. Three laps precede it, and the song the record names arrived inside the third. For a chart with the Sun on the very first degree of Gemini, a record that sets two accounts against each other and refuses to settle them is almost too apt. His Moon sits late in Leo at noon, close enough to the next sign that it may have reached Virgo, which puts the private half between wanting the room and finding fault with it.