Bush Tetras
Biography
The Bush Tetras is a rock band from New York City. Forming in 1979, they were very popular in the New York club scene in the early 1980s, but never had much mainstream success. Their music combined dance rhythms and dissonant rock-guitar riffs.
Lead guitarist Pat Place and vocalist Cynthia Sley produced the most distinctive aspects of the Tetras sound. Places guitar lines were rhythmic and distortion-filled. She had been the original guitarist and one of the founding members of the No Wave band The Contortions. With the Bush Tetras, Pat continued to pursue some of the musical ideas she had explored in that band, although her distinctive slide guitar is absent from many of the Tetras songs. Sleys vocals were half-spoken, half-sung. In songs like "Too Many Creeps" and "Cant Be Funky," she repeated simple phrases over and over again, creating a hypnotic monotony similar to Places guitar rhythms.
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Place appeared in some of Vivienne Dicks movies co-starring with Lydia Lunch and other musicians from New Yorks thriving, late-1970s and early-1980s music community, an off-shoot of No Wave. These appearances contributed to the bands prominent position in downtown New York in the early 1980. At present there has been a resurgence of interest in this period, and the bands influence can be heard in many younger bands.
After breaking up in 1983, The Bush Tetras briefly reformed in the late 1990s. Beginning in 2005, they again began performing in New York City and in the summer of 2006 in Europe. Read more on Last.fm. User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License; additional terms may apply.
Biography text from Last.fm, available under CC BY-SA.