MJC001 - Astral Body — John Nieuwsma

Visualizing lyrics from Between The Buried And Me’s “Astral Body” off of their studio album The Parallax II: Future Sequence. This is part of a larger collection (MEGAMJC002) intended to visualize the entire album. Lyrics are listed below:

“Analyze my own
Matter from above
Blacked out eyes
In an existence overgrown

Never fall, back down
Trapped in myself

Sold my hands
Envy them
Can't find
The one

I slowly start to cut pieces
Of flesh from my body
Dig in, dissect
Collecting examples of what
The outside world sees
Under it all
I know the devastation
I have caused

Upon myself and this world
Upon myself and this world
Upon myself and this world

Speak to me freely
I am listening
Speak to me freely
I am listening”

Certain phrases have been altered to conform to MidJourney’s user policy, particularly for pairings of words such as “flesh” and “cut”. Repetitive lines have also been reduced. Inspiration was taken from Niko Chocheli’s abstract and ornate biblical illustrations. Prompt was also paired with a parent image of the album’s concept art to better connect the styles (see prompt text).

Feeding off individual lines allows MidJourney a lot of room for interpretation. It’s no surprise then that its generated work was so abstract given the sparse additional text prompts. Adding terms such as “ornate” in combination with “detailed” and “illustration” tend to create a pretty consistent style of tangled, Rococo embellishments that look wild and untamed like that of unkempt vines. This “naturalistic” ornateness is most apparent in what appear to be flowers and clouds in a few of the images. Peculiarly, I also noticed several points at which the flowing embellishments would converge and create hair so that it seemed to be a women with her back turned to us.

Other obvious delineations in the abstractions were likely tied to the lyrics themselves when they offered more concrete descriptors such as “eyes” and “hands”. Curiously, I have noticed what look to be food served on plates and trays. I can only guess that a combination of “dissect”, “pieces”, “body” have created this pattern, though I don’t entirely understand the macabre logic.

Images created from August 18th to 24th, 2022 on MidJourney’s Discord Server.

Full Example Prompt: [link to parent image] [lyric], art by niko chocheli, cosmic purple and pastel blue deep black, ornate, detailed illustration --ar 16:9 --quality 2