Bush Tetras

Bush Tetras
At the Slipper Room, NYC 2013
Background information
Origin	New York City, United States
Genres	Post-punk, no wave, dance-punk
Years active	1979–1983, 1995–1998, 2005–present
Labels	99 Records, Fetish Records, Stiff Records, ROIR, Thirsty Ear, Tim/Kerr Records, Polygram Records
Associated acts	The Contortions, Lovelies, Command V
Members	Pat Place Dee Pop Cynthia Sley Val Opielski
Past members	Jimmy Joe Uliana Adele Bertei Laura Kennedy Bob Albertson Don Christenson Julia Murphy Cindy Rickmond

Bush Tetras are an American post-punk band from New York City that was popular in the Manhattan club scene and college radio in the early 1980s but never achieved much mainstream success. Their music combined funk rhythms and dissonant guitar riffs.

Lead guitarist Pat Place and vocalist Cynthia Sley produced the most distinctive aspects of the Tetras sound. Place's 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 Bush Tetras, Place continued to pursue some of the musical ideas she had explored in the Contortions, although her distinctive slide guitar is absent from many of the Tetras songs. Sley's vocals were half-spoken, half-sung. In songs like "Too Many Creeps" and "Can't Be Funky," she repeated simple phrases over and over again, creating a hypnotic monotony similar to Place's guitar rhythms.

Place appeared in some of Vivienne Dick's movies, co-starring with Lydia Lunch and other musicians from New York's thriving late 1970s and early 1980s music community, an offshoot of no wave. These appearances contributed to the band's prominent position in downtown New York in the early 1980s. New York's post-punk revival of the 2000s was accompanied by a resurgence of interest in this period, with the Tetras' influence heard in many of that scene's bands.

The group scored two dance hits in the U.S. in the early 1980s – "Too Many Creeps" peaked at No. 57 Dance in 1981, and "Can't Be Funky/Cowboys in Africa" peaked at No. 32 in 1982 – before their initial split.

Sley later joined up with Ivan Julian of Richard Hell and the Voidoids to form Lovelies. They put out one percussive post-punk album, Mad Orphan (109 Records), in 1988. In 2008, she formed Command V with Pat Irwin of the Raybeats and B-52s, and Rachel Dengiz. They released a self-titled album in 2012 on Mush Records.