First and foremost, I want to say thank you to Andrew Aversion for giving a crap about a long dead Brooklyn band that had the nerve to mix NYHC and death metal long before many had even thought of it.

Confusion started in the summer of 1990 as the second wave of NYHC was coming to a violent end. Bands that had initially inspired Confusion (like Killing Time, Breakdown, Sheer Terror, Outburst, etc.) were either breaking up or changing their sounds, and the CBGB Sunday matinees were gone by the fall of 1990. It was also during this time that Brooklyn forged its own scene outside of NYC at places like L'amour and the infamous Crazy Country Club. The bands that made up the Brooklyn scene were Confusion, Patterns, Lament, Merauder, Life of Agony, Darkside NYC, Nobody's Perfect, Judgement Day NYC, and non-Brooklyn bands like Subzero, Dmize, and a bit later bands like Starkweather, Next Step Up, and All Out War.

I don't think by any means that Confusion invented "deathcore" or the idea to mix real hardcore with death metal. One could say that in NYC Sheer Terror may have done that as early as 1985 on their first demo. But by 1991, Confusion had become pretty obsessed with bands like Obituary, Morbid Angel, Malevolent Creation, Entombed, Death, and Deicide. So much so that NYHC was no longer a part of our sound, but only in our roots and attitude. We were a metal band completely by 1992, hardly even playing the songs on our 1990 or 1991 demos.

In the spring of 1992 we recorded our first and only 7" EP called "Taste of Hate", with the cover art hand drawn by our friend John from Patterns, who went on to become Candiria's guitarist many years later. Candiria was around back then too, but they were a satanic death metal band that didn't even play with hardcore bands until 1994, after Confusion called it a day! The record finally came out in the early fall of 1992. Only 1,000 were pressed and it didn't even sell all that great initially since the band didn't tour and "distros" hardly existed!

Confusion played both hardcore and metal shows, but by 1993/1994 the metalheads were embracing us much more due to how heavy we had become. We were quite popular in the states of Maryland, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey due to the fact that outside of the five boroughs of NYC, those were the only places we played. The best hardcore shows for Confusion were the out of state shows and those that we played with our friends' bands in Brooklyn or NYC. But the biggest shows as far as attendance goes were death metal shows. We played with Cannibal Corpse, Disincarnate, Cancer, Unleashed, Incantation, and countless others. I remember one show in 1993 with Deicide, Dismember, and Vader in front of 600 kids in our hometown of Brooklyn at the defunct club L'amour. Glen Benton told us how much he liked us and the Hoffman brothers smoked weed with the band backstage!

Confusion as a band didn't really get along all that well. We fought a lot and there was even a time when I was kicked out of the band for like two weeks, ha, ha! Our lead singer Mike was going off to college in Florida and in the summer of 1994 we decided that we would end the band at the end of the year. Our last show was in December at L'amour with the mighty Deicide, and it was a good one.

In the summer of 2002, original Confusion guitarist and founding member Frank Collins was killed in a motorcycle accident in Brooklyn. A benefit to raise money for his mother was organized by Rich from Darkside NYC and myself and was held in January 2003 at CBGB's. Confusion reformed for the night and played for one time in honor of Frank. It was a sold out show that also reunited Darkside NYC, our "deathcore" brothers. The lineup also included All Out War, Next Step Up, Shutdown, Bulldoze, Subzero, Kickback, Most Precious Blood, Inhuman, and many more. It was Confusion's first time on stage in nine years and it was a lot of fun, but there was no talk of an actual reformation.

Here is an official discography of what Confusion put out. All of these are out of print:

1990 "Four the Force" demo (100 made, possibly less)
1991 "Distorted Visions" demo (200 made, possibly less)
1992 "Taste of Hate" 7" on Hardway Records (1,000 pressed)
1992 "Beheaded Cadaver" compilation cassette (a death metal comp.)
1993 "East Coast Assault" compilation CD on Too Damn Hype Records
1995 "A Call for Unity" compilation CD on Back ta Basics Records

Many people have asked me over the years when a Confusion discography CD would be made and I have no answer. If a decent record label cared enough to offer up the money to get it done, I would do it in a heartbeat and it would have everything on it, including live performances of the songs we wrote but never recorded, which was among our best material. I personally do not have the means to do it myself, if I did it would have happened years ago.

Here is a brief Confusion "Where are they now?"