Grizzly Steppe
Grizzly Steppe is the experimental side project of Mark Spybey (Dead Voices On Air, Download, Zoviet France) and David Thrussell (Snog, Soma, Black Lung), two of the most respected names in experimental ambient, noise and industrial music.
The pair first met, according to the redacted minutes, in a brewery cellar south west of Leipzig in 2018, a summit that lasted all of two minutes. A year later an email from a seed bank invited Grizzly Steppe to record a live album at an undisclosed location.
That location turned out to be the permafrost of Spitzbergen, Norway. On December 21st, 2019, after an arduous trek into the Arctic Circle, Spybey and Thrussell built a rig of analogue machines and hand-built devices inside the caverns of the facility that houses the world's largest seed vault, and performed a multi-roomed diffusion of frost-bitten tones and seismic sub-bass to an audience of zero. Recorded, edited and mastered by Anatoly "Tokee" Grinberg, Svalbard (RE010) was released by Re:Mission Entertainment on August 7th, 2020, as a CD limited to 100 copies worldwide, hermetically sealed in a Mylar specimen bag with a holographic logo sticker. One copy rests, unopened, in the permafrost of Svalbard.
Both members have stayed busy since. Spybey has released a steady run of Dead Voices On Air albums on Re:Mission, including :snowbeasts: dead voices on air:, Pennine, :jamiel:spybey:, SILENCE, MELT AND MOURN and mothcomma, while Thrussell released Eros Maximus on Ant-Zen in 2025.
