Where the scene comes from and where it went
Tampa Bay holds 35 of the 204 bands on the map and 18 of the 36 with an album tracked at Morrisound, but the map's most consequential single edges run outward: Reifert to the Bay Area, Tägtgren to Ludvika, Pintado to Birmingham, Choy to Enschede, Sepultura to Belo Horizonte, and the 1989 Malmö date a week before Left Hand Path. Stockholm and the English Midlands are the two largest hubs abroad; Gothenburg is smaller and matters more, because it is the one place that built a studio and a genre of its own in answer. The counts below are bands on this map, not the size of each local scene.
Three kinds of spread. Tampa is the center of the original argument, and not every later development in death metal is Tampa influence. The map keeps three relationship types apart. Direct transmission is a documented event: a musician moved, a band recorded at Morrisound, a tour joined two nodes, or a label routed a band or a record; these are personnel, recording, tour and label edges. Documented influence is where the descendant or a reliable source explicitly names the influence, and it is drawn as a dashed line only where that quotation exists. A parallel or answering system is a place that developed its own institutions and its own sound, Stockholm around Sunlight and Gothenburg around Studio Fredman above all; those hubs are on the map for their own studios and credits, and the Tampa connection to them is drawn only where a tour, a person or a quotation supports it.
Counting rule. Bands counts only nodes of kind band (people and institutions are excluded). A band is assigned to one hub region, recorded in the Hub region column of the Nodes sheet, from its place of formation or stated home base, with the folding rule set out in Reading the map; a band that relocated sits at its Florida home. Defunct bands are counted. Morrisound tracked counts the bands with at least one album tracked at the studio. Touring projects, networks and acts whose city is not recorded are excluded from every hub count. The same rule is applied by formula on the Cities sheet of the workbook.
| Hub | Bands | Morrisound tracked | All nodes | What it produced |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1. Tampa Bay | 35 | 18 | 96 | The origin hub: Brandon, Temple Terrace, Ybor City, Clearwater, St. Petersburg, Tarpon Springs, Gibsonton, Sarasota and Bradenton fold into it. Nasty Savage, Savatage, Morbid Angel, Obituary, Deicide, Massacre, Nocturnus, Atheist, Brutality, Assück, Morrisound Recording, the Brass Mug and the Ritz Ybor, then Cannibal Corpse, Angelcorpse, Six Feet Under, Hate Eternal and Diabolic. |
| 2. Orlando | 6 | 2 | 15 | Altamonte Springs and Sanford fold into it: Mantas and Death before Chuck Schuldiner recorded in Tampa, Kam Lee's Comatose zine, Control Denied, Acheron after 1991, Genitorturers, Trivium and Jason Suecof's Audiohammer. |
| 3. South Florida | 6 | 4 | 13 | The Gold Coast hub: Cynic, Malevolent Creation after its 1988 move from Buffalo, Monstrosity in its first years, Solstice, Hellwitch's later base, Criteria Recording and Peter Tägtgren's three years before Hypocrisy. |
| 4. Buffalo | 4 | 0 | 4 | Tirant Sin, Beyond Death and Leviathan produced Cannibal Corpse; Malevolent Creation formed here in 1987; Baphomet stayed. The city that sent two bands to Florida. |
| 5. New York | 17 | 2 | 22 | Long Island, Yonkers, the Bronx, New Jersey and Rhode Island fold into it: Suffocation, Immolation, Incantation, Mortician, Internal Bleeding, Pyrexia, Ripping Corpse, Demolition Hammer, Brutal Truth, Vital Remains, Combat Records and Roadrunner's New York office. |
| 6. Bay Area | 6 | 0 | 10 | Possessed, Autopsy, Sadus, Exhumed, Testament, Necrot and the year Chuck Schuldiner spent in the Bay Area with Chris Reifert. |
| 7. Los Angeles | 7 | 1 | 15 | Slayer, Dark Angel, Terrorizer, Metal Blade Records, Wild Rags and the Music Grinder studio where Scream Bloody Gore was made. |
| 8. Chicago | 3 | 0 | 4 | Master and Death Strike, Broken Hope and Macabre, and the Milwaukee Metalfest a ninety minute drive north. |
| 9. Montreal | 7 | 1 | 8 | Sherbrooke and Longueuil fold into it: Gorguts, Cryptopsy, Kataklysm, Despised Icon, Beyond Creation. |
| 10. Stockholm | 16 | 0 | 25 | Nihilist and Entombed, Dismember, Unleashed, Carnage's later lineup, Tiamat, Therion, Merciless, Necrophobic, Katatonia, Opeth, Bloodbath, Amon Amarth, Sunlight Studio and the Heavy Sound shop. |
| 11. Gothenburg | 8 | 0 | 16 | Grotesque, At the Gates, In Flames, Dark Tranquillity, Ceremonial Oath, The Haunted and Studio Fredman: the place that answered Tampa with its own studio and its own genre. |
| 12. English Midlands | 13 | 2 | 27 | Birmingham, Coventry, Nottingham, Liverpool, Telford, Halifax, Bradford, Dewsbury, Driffield, Newcastle and Ipswich fold into it: Napalm Death, Carcass, Bolt Thrower, Benediction, Cancer, Cathedral, Paradise Lost, My Dying Bride, Anathema, Godflesh, Earache, Peaceville and Slaughterhouse. |
| 13. Netherlands | 5 | 1 | 7 | Enschede, Oldenzaal, Goes, Schiedam, Beilen and Eindhoven fold into it: Pestilence, Asphyx, Gorefest, Sinister, God Dethroned and Dynamo Open Air; Roadrunner was founded here in 1980. |
| 14. Ruhr | 4 | 1 | 6 | Essen, Gelsenkirchen, Dortmund, Hagen and Meschede fold into it: Kreator, Sodom, Morgoth, Century Media and Woodhouse. |
| 15. Poland | 4 | 0 | 4 | Olsztyn, Gdańsk, Krosno and Warsaw fold into it: Vader, Behemoth, Decapitated, Hate. |
| 16. Belo Horizonte | 4 | 1 | 6 | Sepultura, Sarcófago, Holocausto, Cogumelo Records, Vulcano in Santos and Torture Squad in São Paulo. |