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Music

On Alpine Slopes, Snowy Raves are Extending Festival Season

What happens when a 200-car caravan descends on a tiny mountain village?

A customary car parade descends in Mayrhofen, Austria for Snowbombing. Photos by Danny North.

Since the early days of rave, electronic music has been the purview of the summer season. And though frostbite is hardly a deterrent to veterans like us, who'll strap on parkas in search of dance parties in the frigid February tundra, many partygoers prefer to wait for the warmer months to get their bass fix.

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But in recent years, party season has gotten a head start, thanks to a growth spurt in the alpine festival scene. Explorers returning from festivals like Basscamp, Altitude, Big Snow, and Rock the Pistes—which kick off in March and carry on till the summer—tell wide-eyed tales of techno in abandoned mountain villages, bass music on the side of blue-runs, and debauched after parties in converted fondue cafés.

None of this would have happened if Gareth Cooper and his DJ friends hadn't gotten sick of listening to bad techno on the slopes. Gareth is the founder of the original alpine festival,

Snowbombing

, which takes over the quaint Austrian town of Mayrhofen every April. But when I meet up with Cooper at Snowbombing's headquarters—a glass-and-brick converted warehouse in London's Shoreditch neighborhood—he explains that he didn't set out with a prophetic vision to bring British EDM to a (literal) higher plane.

Rather, the first (unofficial) Snowbombing came about as a marketing ploy for his fledging travel agency at the time. "I'd been skiing with mates before, and noticed there was nothing to do in the evenings except listen to cheesy German and French techno at the local bars. So I called up my promoter friends from [parties like] Bugged Out, Sub Dub, and Counterculture…and offered them and their DJs a free holiday if they were willing to play in the evenings. So now we had a gimmick for the flyers: Ski Holiday—DJs every night."

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Over the last 14 years, the festival has managed to grow from trailblazing oddity to industry mainstay. Today, Snowbombing typically attracts between 5 and 8,000 people—making it smaller than some stages at other EDM events. Yet, excitement for each year's event is intense, and lineups are impressive; every year, a mass car rally brings hordes of snow-goggled revelers towards a mixed line-up of new and old-school headliners like Disclosure, Rudimental, Fatboy Slim and The Prodigy.

As Gareth tells it, Snowbombing wouldn't have gotten off the ground if it weren't for a chance meeting—and a bout of good, old-fashioned eavesdropping. In 2004, it was still a relatively small party in the French Alps when Gareth began advertising for brand sponsorship in the back pages of Manchester's Metro paper. One night, Gareth's friend was waiting tables at a local bar when he overheard two men—one of whom had extensive business interests in Austria's Mayrhofen ski resort—pondering the appeal Snowbombing's ski-party concept. Gareth's friend couldn't resist offering to set up a meeting, and after several rounds of (presumably) more formal drinks, Snowbombing moved to Mayrhofen in 2005.

"That's when I began to see this as a festival," Gareth says. While all slopes make look the same to the hungover partier, Austria's Alps were very different from France or Switzerland's. In Austria, an informal but powerful network of hotels, restaurants, bars and piste operators operated as an informal but powerful council for the pursuit of mutual interests—like a UN that declares war on overheads, rather than countries. This was no longer a budget-bedroom and DJ-takeover arrangement. "Now we could really get involved. Beef up sound systems, organize resort-wide parties, and build stages—up mountains, in forests."

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Anyone who's been to Snowbombing knows that the wow factor remains in its spectacularly placed stages. One platform lies 6,000 feet up a mountain, where clubbers watch helicopters pass beneath them, or listen to house music under astonishingly clear stars. Another main stage if found deep in the alpine forest—where lasers and smoke cut through fir trees and smoke.

All of this impressiveness comes at a relatively steep price. Snowbombing is not the cheapest festival in Europe by quite a margin—but its year-on-year growth has flown in the face of a shaky economy, proving that small, pricy festivals in the Alps can still be quite profitable. Gareth himself appears intrigued by the industry's unlikely success. "The festival world has grown," he says, "But I wouldn't say it's recession proof. [Some] events come quickly, go quickly. [Others] come, stay, but continue to lose money." So what's the secret to Snowbombing's longevity? "It sounds cheesy, but it's the people," Gareth replies. Croatia's massively hyped party scene, Gareth argues, owes its exponential growth to its target audience's narrow age range: 19 to early-20s. Snowbombing, on the other hand, targets those in their mid to late-twenties. Or, as Gareth puts it, "Good drunk. Funny drunk. But not rowdy drunk."

In reality, the crowd's drunken amiability is just a small part of Snowbombing's appeal. Again, savvy marketing deserves credit. Every year, hundreds of elaborately decorated cars travel en masse from the UK to Snowbombing, where they're welcomed to much fanfare with a street carnival and parade hosted by the town. "Many people feel like it's the highlight of the event. But in reality we started it to convince people that driving all the way here was a viable option when flight prices went up," Gareth reveals.

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Carl Cox in the mix at Snowbombing

As for its lineup, Snowbombing's approach is constantly evolving. Due to a theory that snowboarders like hip-hop, Gareth booked hip-hop acts for a while. "We learned after that not to generalize demographics," he says with a laugh. Then there was Snowbombing's indie period, from 2009 to 2010, when bands like Doves, Editors, The Enemy, and Friendly Fires all made appearances. Now, EDM's comfortable place in the mainstream has allowed Snowbombing to find its groove in mainstream dance acts with massive appeal—The Chemical Brothers, The Prodigy, Carl Cox, and Chase & Status are all arriving this April.

Snowbombing's success has raised a slew of new (and more afforable) competitors. This year, Bristol's Alpfresco is booking the Hypercolour and Futureboogie powerhouses, Bulgaria's Horizon Festival boasts names like Kerri Chandler, Bondax and KiNK, and Andorra's Snowboxx has the standout TEED. Many of these newer alpine festivals are jaw-droppingly cheap, too. But Gareth seems pleased by the competition, attributing a renewed spike in ticket sales—they'll shift 8,000 tickets this year—to a heightened awareness of snow festivals as viable holiday options. Plus, he believes the logistics behind running these festivals will keep the community small for a while. "It's the next level from a traditional field festival. You've got festival challenges, like stage equipment. Then you've got ski-holiday challenges, like broken bones." While you can usually park DJs in the artist area with drinks tokens at regular festivals, at Snowbombing, they usually stick around for a holiday—and that requires even more logistics-planning.

As our interview draws to a close, I sense an itch. Gareth is looking  towards what's next: an international franchise. Many immensely successful festivals like Tomorrowland and Ultra—whose South African installment recently broke the record as Africa's largest music event in history—have already gone down this extremely profitable road. "Snowbombing should have multiple chapters," he says. To that effect, Snowbombing Whistler is now in the works. Grab your spandex.