Timothy Buckley

Air takes four of his ten planets, fire three, water two and earth a single one. Air works out the angle and fire moves on it; the element that would hold any of it in place is down to one planet. The record gives Buckley nine albums in nine years, each one less commercial than the last.

The Sun sits at twenty five degrees of Aquarius with Mars further back in the sign at sixteen, and the Moon answers from Sagittarius at fifteen. Aquarius builds an identity on not being told; Sagittarius needs room and becomes noticeably difficult without it. For a catalogue the record describes as moving steadily away from whatever sold, a Sun in the sign that will not be instructed and a Moon that requires space is as plain a reading as this project finds.

Two yods run through this chart and Mercury and Pluto are in both of them, one closing with Neptune and the other with Venus. Mercury stands at an awkward angle to Pluto at just under two thirds of a degree and at the same angle to Neptune at three quarters, so thinking is pulled at from two directions by the slowest planets in the chart. The Sun sits in hard contact with Neptune at a third. Four of the ten planets were retrograde at his birth, every one of them from Saturn outwards. In nine albums made in nine years, thinking pulled at from two directions is the fault line the whole catalogue runs along.

He died at Santa Monica on 29 June 1975, at twenty eight. Uranus rules his Aquarius Sun, and that day Mercury stood conjunct his natal Uranus at three quarters of a degree while the Moon stood square it at just over one. Neptune sat sixty degrees from its own natal place at four fifths and square his natal Mercury at just over a degree and a half, which put the planet that obscures a thing back on his speech planet. The Moon was disseminating and sixty eight per cent lit. That is the phase that passes on what was worked out and needs it to land. Two yods built on thinking, in a record of nine albums in nine years, is the structure to keep from this chart: neither figure resolves, and neither did the catalogue.