Visualizing lyrics from Between The Buried And Me’s “Goodbye To Everything” 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:
“I wonder if I'm alive
Breathe slowly
Open your eyes
Can you hear me? (look what's in front of you)
An endless journey (our end)
What do you see? (what do you feel?)
Were we ever really alive?
You know this is the right choice
Let's switch off together
Let's flow to no more
Goodbye, goodbye to everything”
Repetitive lyric lines have been removed in the final text prompt. Inspiration was taken from Niko Chocheli’s abstract and ornate biblical illustrations. Early iterations manifested a bone-white color scheme, but linking a parent image of Parallax II’s concept art as well as descriptors that matched the space fantasy aesthetic (“cosmic purple”, “pastel blue”, “deep black”, etc.) allowed MidJourney to more closely match the original album art in style and color scheme (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 “see”. Depictions of branching roads and stairs could be the result of terms like “choice” and “journey”, while the continuously reappearing motif of skulls is probably from “alive” and “end”.
While I have not combed through every image in this series, a large portion did not initially include Niko Chocheli’s name as a descriptor. It is curious then that the early iterations still include vague cathedral spires similar to an Orthodox Christian church as well as ocean imagery, which Chocheli illustrated much of in his book about Jonah and the whale. However, this coincidence is not unusual since MidJourney often draws on religious imagery, especially in its more abstract prompts dealing with life, death, and thought. The word “flow” could also explain the nature of the embellishments’ movement. I’ve spotted what look like hot air balloons, but I have no explanation for this apart from some technical terminology I might have accidentally used related to the practice.
Images created from August 18th to 24th, 2022 on MidJourney’s Discord Server.
Full Example Prompt: [link to parent image], [lyric], ornate, cosmic purple and pastel blue deep black, detailed illustration --ar 16:9 --quality 2
