Ryuichi Sakamoto

Fire, earth and air hold three planets each here; water holds one. Nothing is scarce, and the balance is as even as this project finds. Sakamoto co-founded an electronic group, scored films, and kept releasing music through two cancers, including a final album recorded a few minutes at a time, which is the detail that tells you what the work was for.

The Sun sits at twenty six degrees of Capricorn with Mercury further back in the sign, and the Moon answers from Virgo. Capricorn works to a plan and pays whatever it costs; Virgo attends to the detail nobody else will hear. A composer who built records out of very small deliberate decisions, and went on building them when each session had to be measured in minutes, is both of those signs behaving exactly as described.

The Sun makes a quintile to Jupiter two hundredths of a degree off exact, which leaves effectively nothing between them: an easy skill with scale rather than a struggle for it. A second group of Mars, Saturn and Neptune sits in Libra, which is drive, limit and image together in the sign of proportion. Uranus and Pluto were the two retrograde planets at his birth. In a composer who built records out of very small decisions, an easy skill with scale is what kept the small decisions from staying small.

He died in Tokyo on 28 March 2023, at seventy one. The Moon that day was a crescent, forty one per cent lit. That is the phase that pushes against the weight of how things have always been done. Neptune, the planet of what cannot quite be stated, made easy contact with his natal Sun at a third of a degree, and the transiting Sun stood conjunct his natal Jupiter within a degree, which is the same planet his Sun had been working easily with since birth. For a composer whose last record was made in fragments, a sky that touched the two most generous points in his chart is a reasonable one to go out under.