A scene is a place before it is a genre

Every node on the map is a band, a person or an institution. Bands carry the lineage color. People appear when they make a material connection legible: the guitarist who leaves one band and founds another, the drummer who plays in three projects, the producer whose credit connects a label to a room, the A and R man who signs the roster. Institutions are the studios, labels, festivals, venues and networks that decide who gets heard, and they have equal standing with the bands because the project treats a scene as the whole system that gets music from a rehearsal room to an audience. On this map one institution, Morrisound Recording, sits at the center of the argument, as the convergence point inside a larger system of people, standards and labels rather than as the sole cause of anything.

Connections come in three weights. Solid lines are personnel, spawning and production: a member, a founder, a band that came out of another, a producer's credit. Dashed lines are influence, used only where the descendants have said it themselves. Dotted lines are recording credits, labels, festival appearances and tours. The interactive map lets you switch any of the three off, so the personnel skeleton and the studio graph can each be read on their own.

The map covers death metal as a scene that began in Tampa Bay and the places it reached, 1979 to 5 September 2026: the Florida origin and its precursors, the studio at its center, the labels that came to it, the bands that flew in to record, the scenes that answered it in Stockholm, Gothenburg, the English Midlands, the Netherlands, Germany, Poland, Brazil and Quebec, the genres downstream of it, and the revival of the 2010s and 2020s. The Florida origin is mapped at the finest grain, member by member, because that is where the personnel moves are densest and best documented; the scenes abroad are mapped at the level of the bands, the founders, the studios and the hubs.

Inclusion rules. A band, person or institution is on the map when it has at least one documented link of the types below to another node. A band is linked to a studio only when a specific album and year are recorded for it: Leprosy 1988, Altars of Madness 1988, Arise 1991, Harmony Corruption 1990, Effigy of the Forgotten 1991, Considered Dead 1991, Death Shall Rise 1991, Testimony of the Ancients 1991 and so on down the credit table. Several widely repeated Morrisound credits are wrong, and those albums are placed at the studio where they were in fact made: Scream Bloody Gore at the Music Grinder in Los Angeles, Beneath the Remains at Nas Nuvens in Rio de Janeiro, Immolation's Dawn of Possession at Music Lab in Berlin, Disincarnate's album in Wales and Liverpool, Morgoth's Cursed at Woodhouse in Hagen, Atheist's Elements and Malevolent Creation's Stillborn at Pro Media in Gainesville, Retribution at Criteria in Miami. Hub region means the place of formation, or the home base a band states for itself, folded into a metro hub: Tampa Bay includes Brandon, Temple Terrace, Ybor City, Clearwater, St. Petersburg, Tarpon Springs, Gibsonton and Sarasota; Orlando includes Altamonte Springs and Sanford; Miami and Fort Lauderdale are one South Florida hub; New York includes Long Island, Yonkers, the Bronx, New Jersey and Rhode Island; the English Midlands hub includes Birmingham, Coventry, Nottingham, Liverpool, Telford and the Yorkshire towns; the Ruhr includes Essen, Gelsenkirchen, Dortmund, Hagen and Meschede. A band that relocated sits at its Florida home, with its origin recorded in its city field, so Cannibal Corpse and Malevolent Creation count for Florida and their Buffalo feeder bands count for Buffalo. A band belongs to one lineage, the one that best describes the network it sits in: first generation bands sit in their geographic lane, and bands whose reason for inclusion is a downstream genre sit in the genres lane wherever they are from. The Morrisound flag on a band means: tracked, at least one full album tracked at the studio; partial, a record mixed or mastered there only, or a Scott Burns production made elsewhere. Edge types are: member of, founded, moved to, spawned (a band formed by members of another), became (a rename or direct successor), side project, produced, worked at (a staff or A and R role at an institution), recorded at, label, festival or venue or tour, collaboration, guest support (a session or stand in role, never coded as membership), and influenced (used only where the descendants have said it themselves).

Timeline placement. On the lineage view and in the Play animation a band or institution enters at its founding year and a person at their first documented activity, taken from the earliest dated relation on the map. A node with no recorded founding year enters at the first year the map documents it and never earlier; the interactive panel labels these under Placed at, and the Nodes sheet carries the basis in its Place year basis column. A node with no dated link at all enters at the cutoff year; no node in this version is placed there. Institutions founded before 1979 enter at the left edge of the timeline with their founding year stated. Influence relations never date a node.

People on the map. The map does not list every musician in every band. A person appears when they move between two or more mapped bands; when they are a founding or core member needed to explain a mapped band's formation, continuity or public identity; when they create a documented production, management, label or studio connection; or when an official source records a guest role. Each person is labeled by relationship class in the workbook and in the map panel: personnel connector, founding or core member, institutional connector, or guest support performer. Guest support roles are visible in the full map and are never counted as membership in the people and production graph.

Four ways to look at it. Lineage lays the scene on a timeline, left to right by founding year, one lane per lineage; it shows how much of the map is founded between 1983 and 1991 and how late the genres and the revival arrive. Network lets the connections pull the map into clusters, which shows which nodes carry the most connections in this dataset: Death, Morrisound, Morbid Angel, Nuclear Blast, Obituary, Napalm Death. Cities places everything on a world map by hub, and that view during Play is the spread itself: Tampa first, then the studio lines and personnel lines reaching Buffalo, New York, California, Sweden, Britain, the Netherlands, Germany, Brazil and Quebec. 3D draws the same network in three dimensions with WebGL, with the same filters, cases and panel, for reading the clusters from any angle.

Network interpretation. Node size on the map and the centrality figures in this document are computed on this dataset, with every edge type weighted equally and parallel edges counted separately. They describe position in the map, not popularity, sales, quality, moral importance or cultural importance outside the dataset; a band with one label deal and one influence line is small however large its audience. The map includes only documented nodes and relationships, not the entire scene, and the scene's historical significance is a different question from the map's internal calculations. A ranked table and the counting method are in the Network metrics section, and the section says plainly where the computed ranking differs from what the brief expected.