Jurgis Lietunovas is an art director, practicing astrologer and a co-host and editor at CW&CW. He is also the creator of Radio Venus Club.
What is Radio Venus Club?
Radio Venus suggests music using astrology. You enter your birthdate, it calculates your Natal Venus position, and matches you with musicians—from a growing database of around 1,200 artists—whose birth or album release dates share your Venus zodiac sign and degree. In Hellenistic astrology, Venus governs our aesthetic sensibility: the art and music we’re drawn to, and how we express love. Every zodiac sign carries a distinct flavor, and Venus speaks through that specific frequency.
Building the database was the real labor. Google’s AI helped parse publicly available interviews, but more obscure musicians rarely publish their birthdays, so I often use their most iconic album release date instead. Categorizing genres was its own wormhole. There are thousands of subgenres, and I’m deeply grateful to Glenn McDonald, whose incredible project in categorizing every song on Spotify informed how I organized Radio Venus.
My own Venus being in Gemini means I’m genuinely drawn to music that crosses boundaries. I built several main genre threads as entry points for most ears, while leaving room for stranger combinations. The “Today’s Moon / Sun Playlist” captures every musician whose Venus is close to the transiting Sun or Moon—the Sun moves one degree per day, the Moon thirteen, opening different time scales for discovery. Sometimes it gives some unexpected combinations, rap songs followed by classic, or drone. Some kind of story is being woven. In addition, there’s also an “Intercelestial” playlist for artists whose sound simply refuses to be pinned down.
Why did you make it?
As a practicing astrologer and designer, I wanted to create a beautiful, useful tool to foster deeper self-understanding while highlighting the mysterious, sometimes literal workings of astrology. When preparing for astrology readings, I spend time with old manuscripts and their translations, and I’m always arrested by their illustrations. The people who made those celestial images were clearly in contact with something beyond the physical. There’s a quality of light in them, a feeling of something precious and fragile glimpsed against a vast darkness. I wanted to make something that carried that quality: practically useful, but aesthetically transcendental. Something that felt the way Earth looks from space.
I also wanted to test whether Venus actually does what astrology says it does—whether it genuinely shapes aesthetic sensibility. To my surprise, I realized early on that the majority of musicians on Radio Venus had Venus in Gemini, the exact same placement as me! Despite my efforts to stay objective in my curation, my own Venus was pulling the strings. But as I added microgenres and the database grew, the tool moved further away from my personal bias. People began telling me the suggested music felt made specifically for them, often finding their favorite artists at the very top of their list without knowing why.
Who or what inspired you?
Analog Radio. It might sound cliche but from a poetico-functional standpoint I was mostly inspired by the radio—a tool connecting us to something beyond our control. As a child, driving with my family, the radio would play music that some of us liked and some of us didn’t—and that was beautiful. None of us could curate it. We were all connected by something outside our control, something that moved through us differently but moved through all of us. And because there was no screen showing you who was playing, if you missed the presenter announcing the song, it was gone. I first heard Chumbawamba’s Tubthumping that way, lost it for years, and finally found it again on MTV.
That experience of music—fleeting, unchosen, shared—feels deeply different from how we listen now, where algorithms suggest us exactly what our behavioral data predicts we want. Radio Venus borrows the older operation. Instead of quantified behavior, it uses the patterns of the stars that navigators once read when crossing unknown seas and deserts. Instead of giving you what you already know you like, it offers you something that is arrived at through a system that is ancient, mysterious, and based on cycles that long predate us as humans. When you try it, something finds you. You don’t always know why it worked but maybe the not-knowing is the point .
