The Deletist

Tena “Deletist” – Chronicle of a San Francisco Underground Icon’s Early Years in the Underground Scene

Tena Lethe emerged in the late 1990s as a polymath of San Francisco’s fringe art world. Under the alias “Deletist,” she delved into music, zines, and DIY performance from the start. By 1998 she was already self-publishing a gritty comic zine called Bitter Pie, an ongoing saga following a young female anti-hero named Charlott through the gutters of punk lifezinewiki.commsmagazine.com. Bitter Pie’s pages confronted addiction, corruption, death, oppression, loneliness, and the inner workings of punk/crust/DIY subculture, with unflinching honestymsmagazine.com. The comic’s raw, scribbly style and dark satire recalled the work of Lynda Barry – Cruddy, Barry’s illustrated novel of a battered teen, comes to mind as “darkly funny and resonant with humanity” in ways Bitter Pie also achievessimonandschuster.com. Each issue of Bitter Pie even came with a bold “NOT YOUR BITCH” sticker, signaling its uncompromising feminist-punk stancezinewiki.com.

“Like a wound that never heals, Charlott is now regarded as an onion with only one peel! Forever branded as what one bought from those that deal.”msmagazine.com – Bitter Pie #20 (2010)

This darkly poetic line from Tina’s zine encapsulates the tone: semi-autobiographical grit mixed with sardonic humor. By 2010, 20 issues of Bitter Pie had been releasedzinewiki.com, and a long-awaited 160-page hardcover anthology was eventually in the works to compile the series (teased by Tina in later years on social media). In many ways, Bitter Pie was Tina’s first diary of the underground – a comic book Bildungsroman for a generation of lost artists. It established her as a “woman-published, San Francisco-based” comic creator unafraid to tackle taboo subjects with a DIY snarlmsmagazine.com. Her work celebrated fiercely independent women who criticized society and “spent their lives searching for moments that truly make them feel alive”msmagazine.com.

The Birth of “Deletist” and Musical Explorations

Around 2003, Tina adopted the moniker Deletist for her musical output – a name hinting at erasure, memory and nihilism that would define her sound. Described as “one woman, dark cinematic lullabies / black ambience”, Deletist’s music blended ethereal melancholy with harsh noiselast.fm. Over the years she accrued a web of aliases and side-projects: in underground circles she might be known as Bitter Pie (for her comics), Das Blut (German for “the blood,” a persona she used in orchestral noise experiments), Big Black Butthole (an irreverent handle for a lo-fi covers project), Weltschmerz (“world-pain,” fitting her bleak outlook), or even Di Seta Scura (“of dark silk”)last.fmmail.sonichits.com. These pseudonyms were less separate people than facets of the same artistic entity – an “autonomous multimedium” artist working across form and genredeletist.bandcamp.com.

By the early 2000s, Deletist had become enmeshed in the Bay Area’s experimental music community. She was briefly part of the anarcho-art collective Entartete Kunst (German for “degenerate art”) that organized political noise/hip-hop shows and compilations around the Baynorcalnoisefest.com. (In a 2014 festival roster she’s noted as an “ex-member” of that “anarchist collective”, underscoring her early activist art rootsnorcalnoisefest.com.) She also took inspiration from the global noise scene – even the name “Das Blut & Zorn Orkestra” crops up in her credits, hinting at a Germanic noise ensemble she led or collaborated withdeletist.bandcamp.com. Indeed, Tina’s involvement with a German noise ethos ran deep: the very term Entartete Kunst was a subversive reclaiming of the label the Nazis gave to modern art, and Deletist embraced the outsider role fully. “I am now officially enrolled at the Henry Darger school for success,” she joked, referencing the famously outsider artist in a 2014 blog postwastecentral.ning.com. Self-mockery aside, there’s truth in it – she cultivated an outsider status as a “rogue off-grid” artist, a degree from the “Henry Darger Institute for Success in the Dead Arts,” as one tongue-in-cheek bio blurb put itbayimproviser.com.

Discography and Sonic Experiments

Over two decades, Deletist built an eclectic discography, much of it self-released through her own “Bleakhaus/Bleakhaustruk” label. Highlights include:

  • Motion/Deletist – Clones (The London Recordings 2003): a collaboration with London producer Motion, born from her travels in the early 2000s. This “microtonal nervous ticks” project was foreshadowed as Recon Clones in her early web postsmail.sonichits.com. It reflects her international ties – she absorbed UK experimental influences while abroad (indeed it was a trip to London that inspired her next big endeavor in SF, as we’ll see).

  • “3rd Class Cover Songs” (a.k.a. Big Black Butthole): a lo-fi covers collection wherein Deletist paid noisy homage to underground classics. The title references noise-rock pioneers Big Black and Butthole Surfers in winking fashion. New MP3s from this were floated online in the mid-2000smail.sonichits.com.

  • Relive (limited CD, ~2009): Marketed as her “13th independent release since 1999”mail.sonichits.com, Relive compiled earlier works, capturing the evolution of her sound. This era saw Deletist fully blossom in “black ambience” and doom-drone, with limited CDRs traded like secret documents among noise enthusiasts.

  • Disappearing: Impromptus for Piano, Cello, Oboe, Noise & Blood (2015): A split experiment credited to Das Blut & Zorn Orkestra, merging classical instruments with harsh noise in real-time improvisationsdeletist.bandcamp.com. This speaks to her compositional ambition – straddling the concert hall and the DIY noise basement in one project.

  • After We Have Been Disappeared, Only in Objects Will Our Memory Be Kept (Double Album, 2015): An ominously titled double album of remixes (1999–2015), effectively summing up the first chapter of Deletist’s careerdeletist.bandcamp.com. Notably, electronic music luminary Thomas Dimuzio remastered some of this material in 2020deletist.bandcamp.com, underscoring the respect she garnered in SF’s experimental music circles.

  • Mourning Rituals & Releasing Rites (2024): A recent release continuing her trajectory into ritual ambient and noise catharsis – evidence that her creative fire still burns.

  • Oblivion (2025): Her latest offering (as of this writing), suggesting that even after so many years Tina is still actively distilling hopelessness into sound. The very title “Oblivion” nods to her enduring theme of memory and forgetting – a fitting capstone for the Deletist oeuvre.

(The full Deletist discography spans 14+ releasesdeletist.bandcamp.comdeletist.bandcamp.com, including the above and other curiosities like Empty, The Deletist (a self-titled collection), and Thrown Under the Bus (an EP by her band Friends of the Jitney, released 2015) – the latter being an oddball folk-electronica project where she and friends channeled Woody Guthrie-esque Americana through a noise filterdeletist.bandcamp.com.)

Through all these sonic experiments, Tina’s collaborations have been key. She was the producer and a frequent member of CTRL V 3RR0R, a “power electronics” trio that she describes as an improvisational noise project whose only stipulation is 3 entities making noise – even if sometimes that “trio” included ghosts or altars as membersdeletist.bandcamp.com. (The debut album of CTRL V 3RR0R in 2015, gloriously titled “YOU DON’T NEED A DICK TO FUCK AROUND WITH LFO,” lists Deletist among an ensemble of prankish alter-egos like Kat Genikov and Sandy Demonsleeperdeletist.bandcamp.com.) She also co-founded the group Friends of the Jitney, contributing songs to their 2004–2005 recordingsdeletist.bandcamp.com. All of this cements her reputation as a DIY multi-instrumentalist and noise composer with a foot in many projects – a “one-woman band” in the most literal sense, yet constantly in creative exchange with others in the underbelly of the Bay.

Bleakhaus: The Mission District’s Infamous Party House

One cannot tell Tina’s story without Bleakhaus – both a physical space and a mythos in the SF underground. Bleakhaus was an aging three-story Victorian at 2429 Mission Street (near 20th) that Tina called home for many yearsucancallmeph.blogspot.comucancallmeph.blogspot.com. The name (a play on Dickens’ Bleak House, with a German “haus” twist) became synonymous with wild shows and artistic chaos. By all accounts, the building was a “beautiful slum”: leaning walls, peeling paint, unreliable plumbing and electricity – a decaying sanctuary for misfitsucancallmeph.blogspot.comucancallmeph.blogspot.com. Tina moved into Bleakhaus in the mid-’90s as a young art student, and over the next two decades she turned it into a nucleus of subterranean culture.

At Bleakhaus, Tina hosted countless free noise and doom gigs in the 2000s and early 2010s – full-volume experimental shows held literally in her living room, often to avert the prying eyes of authorities and landlords. She was the booking mastermind and den mother of the house. Local experimental acts like Black Thread, 5lowershop affiliates, and touring noise musicians found a welcome (if structurally precarious) stage thereucancallmeph.blogspot.comcatsynth.com. The shows were “clandestine” in the truest sense: unlicensed, after-hours, advertised by word-of-mouth or cryptic flyers. Bleakhaus became a haven for those craving authenticity amid a city veering into gentrified blandness. As Tina later lamented, “there was nothing subversive or close to the bone left in that town anymore” by the mid-2010sucancallmeph.blogspot.com – but Bleakhaus was one of the last holdouts of the old SF spirit.

Life in Bleakhaus could be as chaotic as the shows. Tina’s blog recounts winters without heat where all other roommates fled to warmer refuges, leaving her alone with a bicycle headlamp strapped on as she huddled in the decrepit Victorian, “frozen in your room” with only ghosts for companyucancallmeph.blogspot.comucancallmeph.blogspot.com. Indeed, Bleakhaus earned a reputation for being haunted – residents and visitors (fueled by substances and imagination) often reported a male presence “wandering around” the hallsucancallmeph.blogspot.com. Tina half-jokingly took on the role of a medium in those days, attempting to “cross over” the restless spirit that shared her homeucancallmeph.blogspot.com. (It’s telling that one of Deletist’s later projects was literally called Hungry Ghosts of Bleakhaus.) This mix of the paranormal and the punk mundane only added to the house’s lore.

Bleakhaus was not just a venue – it was Tina’s crucible. In the summer of 2015, facing mounting eviction threats, she finally conceded to reality and left the Mission for gooducancallmeph.blogspot.comucancallmeph.blogspot.com. The final show in Bleakhaus was a bittersweet affair. As one account (penned by Tina in second-person) describes, “During one of the last free noise & doom shows at Bleakhaus… you were alone naked and drunk in the bathroom… crawling into the clawfoot tub, submerged in hot water, you quietly cried, knowing it would all be over soon.”ucancallmeph.blogspot.com In the hallway, the delicate loops of a noise act echoed for a small crowd while Tina privately mourned the end of an era. This raw scene – a woman literally in tears in a dark bathroom while the city raged outside – captures the heartbreak of so many underground artists watching San Francisco’s soul evaporate in the tech boom. As she stepped out of that tub and that house, “knowing the time had come to leave the Mission forevermore,” Tina joined the exodus of DIY creatives forced out by rising rents and cultural erosionucancallmeph.blogspot.com.

Ever resourceful, she did not go far – Tina moved her life into a big white panel truck, retrofitting it into a mobile home and continuing her journey off-grid. That vehicle, affectionately dubbed “Bleaktruck,” became her new base of operations. In true Deletist fashion, she turned exile into art: Bleaktruck doubled as a recording studio, a tiny venue, and a canvas for her ideas. (Tragically, in late 2022 Bleaktruck was briefly impounded, prompting friends to raise funds in her support – a testament to how beloved she is in the communitygofundme.com.) Through all the instability, Tina’s ethos of “embracing hopelessness” remained intactdeletist.bandcamp.com. She even parodied her situation with gallows humor, christening her DIY label “Bleakhaustruk productions”bayimproviser.com.

Collaborations, Friendships, and Influence

Despite often being the lone woman in a male-dominated noise scene, Deletist was never truly alone. She fostered deep alliances with fellow underground artists, becoming a kind of magnetic north for a scattered tribe of weirdos. Two figures stand out:

  • Brice Frillici: A prolific noise musician and podcaster, Brice was a kindred spirit of Tina’s. They lived only blocks apart in the Mission District during the 2010s, and their lives intersected constantly. Brice and Deletist played many of the same secret gigs and dives; both were core to the Bleakhaus-era noise network. In recent years, Brice has even featured The Deletist on his recordings – on his 2013 album Sekdek (Below Me), the track “Midnight Burial” credits The Deletist as a featured artistqobuz.com. The two also collaborated on visual art: Brice’s Gail Satan album (2024) notes that its original concept and cover art were a collaboration with “Thee Deletist”, hinting at creative brainstorming between thembubblegoreproductions.podbean.com. Moreover, Brice’s Sekdek Podcast carries forward the lo-fi, raw ethos that he and Tina both cherished; one can easily imagine the late-night conversations and rants they shared finding new life in those podcast episodes. It’s clear Brice saw Tina as more than a friend – she was an artistic co-conspirator. “Original idea & ... cover art collab with Thee Deletist will show up again somewhere,” he assures listeners, a sign of ongoing synergybubblegoreproductions.podbean.com. Together, Brice and Tina navigated the post-Bleakhaus landscape – producing podcasts, attending each other’s DIY shows, and keeping the flame of underground art flickering in a city that often seemed to have forgotten it.

  • Chris of Skullcaster: Chris (last name rarely used, in true punk fashion) helmed Skullcaster, a noise project that began in San Francisco and later migrated to Austin. In Skullcaster’s SF days, Chris was very much part of Tina’s circle. He performed at the Placard/Plug headphone festivals that Tina organized – in fact, Skullcaster and The Deletist appeared side by side in the lineup of the first SF headphone fest in 2005catsynth.com. Those “BYO Headphones” events were revolutionary in their intimacy: artists broadcasting live to a quiet room of headphone-clad listeners (and to an internet stream), trading the usual roar of a PA for a strangely private shared experience. Tina discovered the concept in London and brought it home, becoming the organizer of the San Francisco edition (she insisted on being credited only as “The Deletist” in press)wired.com. The Plug Festival became a hub for Bay Area experimentalists – and Chris’s Skullcaster was a staple act, known for abrasive textures and politically charged samples. The friendship between Tina and Chris was cemented in these late-night hours at warehouse spaces like 5lowershop (which hosted Plug 2005–06)catsynth.comcatsynth.com. They bonded over their love of “heaphone concerts” and all things noisy and nihilistic. Even after Chris relocated to Texas, the two kept in touch; Skullcaster’s Bandcamp now poignantly notes “skullcaster is dead”skullcaster.bandcamp.com, but the legacy of that project lives on in the memories of those SF shows. Tina often cites Chris as a comrade in arms – another lost soul who understood the beauty in the broken. In the oral history of this scene, you’ll frequently hear their names together, spoken with equal parts respect and nostalgia.

Beyond Brice and Chris, Tina collaborated with a litany of other underground figures: experimental vocalist Demonsleeper (Alexandra Buschman) was a frequent bill-mate and joined Tina in the supergroup CTRLV3RR0R by 2014norcalnoisefest.com; she has tracks with industrial artist To-Bo and appeared on obscure noise compilations; she even co-hosted a short-lived pirate radio show in SF’s twilight years of analog radio. Her network of co-creators spanned from local punk bands to international avant-garde composers. And through it all, she remained generous and community-minded – organizing global “Placard” headphone festivals, running open-mic nights at Bleakhaus, and contributing to zines and blogs by others. A Wired Magazine piece in 2005 captured her spirit well. Standing amid a tangle of cables at the headphone fest, she laughed nervously to the reporter and said: “I just like being in your own head and not hearing dumb conversations like at other concerts.”wired.com That quip – half-joking, half-dead-serious – endeared her to many. It’s the voice of an artist who truly valued pure listening and raw authenticity over all the noisy nonsense of mainstream life.

Legacy and Cultural Impact

Today, Tina “Deletist” Lethe occupies a unique, revered place in San Francisco’s cultural memory. For those of us who lived and created art in that era, she is nothing short of a legend – albeit a legend who might blush at the term. Her influence can be felt in multiple domains:

  • Underground Comics: Bitter Pie inspired countless zinesters to spill their guts on the page. Her zine’s fearless confrontation of trauma and addiction, filtered through a sardonic, cartoonish lens, paved the way for a new wave of feminist comics in the Bay. Readers saw echoes of Lynda Barry’s unvarnished style in Tina’s work, but also something uniquely her own – an almost post-punk confessional approach. As one review noted, “The comic is equal parts semi-autobiography, dark satire and female fantasy”, ultimately celebrating outsiders who stay true to themselvesmsmagazine.com. That spirit lives on in SF’s zine fest scene, where the Not Your Bitch stickers and Charlott’s saga are fondly remembered.

  • Noise/Experimental Music: Through her music and event organizing, Deletist revitalized the SF noise scene in the 2000s. She helped import the Placard headphone festival concept to the U.S., effectively “breaking the streak” of failed American attempts and earning praise from the Paris founders who dubbed her fest “the best transmission of the year”catsynth.comcatsynth.com. Many artists – from electronic composer Beth Custer to local circuit-benders – got a platform (sometimes literally a couch in a warehouse) thanks to Tina’s effortscatsynth.com. The current generation of Bay Area experimental musicians, who might perform in galleries or stream from bedrooms, owe a debt to those communal experiments. She showed that music could be both a shared ritual and an intensely personal one (everyone in their own headphone world). And her own recordings, quietly influential, continue to be discovered by younger listeners seeking genuine, uncategorizable sounds.

  • Community and Ethos: Perhaps Tina’s greatest impact is less tangible but most profound – she embodied the underground ethos of San Francisco at a time when it was under threat. She maintained a party house for art when landlords wanted tech offices; she stayed DIY when others cashed in; she chose a frugal, creative life on the margins over comfort in the mainstream. In doing so, she became a role model for “true underground creators.” Her personal mantra of “embracing hopelessness” was not a call to despair, but a darkly humorous rallying cry to find freedom outside society’s false hopesdeletist.bandcamp.com. Like the protagonist of her Bitter Pie comics, Tina showed that even if the world branded you a junkie or a failure, you could write your own story (or song, or comic) and find moments of grim joy. She stood for the idea that art is worth living for, even if it doesn’t pay the rent. In a city famed for revolutions – from the Beat poets to the punk rockers – Tina was one of the last guardians of the real San Francisco bohemia as the 20th century gave way to the 21st.

Today, you might find Tina wandering with her Bleaktruck from desert gathering to city alley, dog Sadie at her side, selling zines or playing a noise set for anyone who cares to listen. She earned the honorific “veteran artist of the Bay Area scene”, as one friend’s fundraiser called hergofundme.com. Those who knew her (and those who only knew of her) carry forward her legacy in the art they make and the communities they foster. In the end, Tina “Deletist” is less a single person and more a symbol – of raw creation, of refusal to conform, and of the beautiful art that blooms in society’s cracks.

In one of her semi-animated films, Children of The Black Sun: A Graphic Manifesto, there’s a moment that encapsulates Tina’s voice. Over grimy black-and-white drawings, with noise music swelling, a message appears: “We are all haunted. But we keep creating.” That, ultimately, is Deletist’s creed.

She was there, bearing witness to the city’s slide into soullessness, and turning that despair into something perversely uplifting – art that screams truth. For those of us who remain lost and lonely underground artists, Tina’s work and life remind us that we are not alone in the void. As long as one Deletist is out there in the dark, hitchhiking on the highway shoulder in a “Not Your Bitch” t-shirt (just like Charlott on the cover of Bitter Pie #19

 

), the spirit of the underground survives.

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