Mayrhofen Doesn’t Look Like This in Summer

The village of Mayrhofen sits in the Zillertal valley in the Austrian Tyrol, which in any normal context means skiing, schnapps, and lederhosen. For one week every April it means something else entirely. Snowbombing has been doing this since 2000—dropping a proper music festival into the middle of the Alps, running headline sets at altitude while the slopes are still open, throwing parties in forest clearings and igloos and mountain huts that have no business hosting a DJ.

The 2011 lineup was genuinely something: The Prodigy and Fatboy Slim anchoring the big nights, Jamie Woon and Ms Dynamite representing the newer British end of things, Fergie and Yasmin filling in around the edges. A weekend that covered roughly twenty years of UK dance music without feeling like a nostalgia exercise, because the setting kept it from feeling safe or comfortable. The panorama isn’t backdrop at Snowbombing—it’s a condition. Your legs are already wrecked from the mountain. The air is thinner. Everything sounds slightly different up there, and I don’t just mean the acoustics.

Normal festivals fight mud and logistics and the tedium of flat fields. Snowbombing fights altitude and the absurdity of its own premise, which is: what if the after-party never stopped and also you had to ski down to it? The answer, apparently, is that it becomes one of the best festivals in Europe. I wasn’t arguing.