Death: the personnel engine

Death was not simply a band with changing lineups. In this dataset it is the personnel engine: a sequence of working groups whose members move into Massacre, Autopsy, Cynic, Testament, Control Denied, Iced Earth, Death to All, Gruesome and Left to Die. That makes Death a bridge across Florida, the Bay Area, New York, the revival and the international technical death metal network, and it is why Death is the highest betweenness node on the full graph in this version of the dataset (0.178) [WHU] [BHU]. After the 1990 European tour goes out under the Death name without him, Chuck Schuldiner rebuilds the band around guest musicians for every album, and each rebuild adds a bridge: the Californians Chris Reifert, Steve DiGiorgio and Gene Hoglan and the Swede Andy LaRocque come to it from outside Florida and carry what they learn back out. The rank does not diminish Morrisound. Betweenness rewards a node that sits on paths between otherwise separate clusters, and a rotating band does that in a way a fixed room cannot; the room is where most of those working groups made their records. Not every association is equally central, and Figure 3 separates the edge classes: the Florida origin lineage, the incoming musicians, the alumni and spawn paths, and the archival and revival paths. The personnel migrations table lists every person on the map with two or more band affiliations in order of joining.

Personnel migrations

Every person on the map who has played in two or more mapped bands, in order of joining. Terry Butler's chain is the longest.