From 4 to 8 April next year, Chamonix hosts its Unlimited Festival. This fourth open-air Alpine festival features even more beautiful people: Amélie Lens, Laurent Garnier and Modeselektor have already been announced for this spring destination for skiers and board riders.
“Unique locations, amazing artists, après-ski in the pool, intense parties, which luckily end early, because tomorrow you have to get back on the pistes, because the spring snow won’t wait”. That’s how Édouard Rostand describes the Unlimited Festival at Chamonix. After the Corsican beaches of Calvi on the Rocks and the Big Festival at Biarritz, this festival programmer par excellence made the decision to “bring full-on lovers of skiing, raclette and electronic music (…) together in an authentic mountain destination. Altitude, sun and techno are a great combo”. We spent a few minutes with him to talk about it...
“A gondola lift that takes you dancing beneath the stars with Mont Blanc right in front of you”. That’s the unique promise of a festival with more than one surprise up its sleeve. Instead of packing out traditional concert halls, this festival has chosen secret places - some of them challenging to reach - to create an amazing rapport between artists and audiences in a completely unique setting: places like the Lognan mountain refuge, the Aiguille du Midi, the Sea of Ice, and dance floors in the snow with Mont Blanc right in front of you... staggering!
"Enthralled artists"
“At 3,842 metres altitude partying to sets on the Aiguille du Midi, your perception of sound is different and you hear things in a new way: it’s very physical. It’s also euphoric and exhausting at the same time! The artists feel it too. They do things differently than on a big stage”.
“Enthralled artists”, whose sets are - to put it mildly - enthralling, because they hold nothing back in delivering for their demanding audience. So last year, the Unlimited featured the big hitters of electronic music: Ben Klock, Marcel Dettmann, Kerri Chandler, Maceo Plex… artists you could then see skiing slopes enjoying the crystal-fresh air, or later in the season at the festivals built around the artists in residence at Unlimited Studio, the festival recording studio.
It’s also about offering festival goers an unexpected pace of life: “We want people to chill - literally- leaving their urban habits behind, and getting them to breathe, sweat, dance, think, sleep. You sleep so well in the mountains...” It’s a mission embraced by other festivals that also celebrate spring snow among the peaks of the Alps: Snowboxx at Avoriaz – with Fatboy Slim or Loyle Carner, the RadioMeuh Music Festival at La Clusaz, Gliss & Mix at Vars, Live in Tignes, and Musilac, the new festival in Chamonix.
Zoom in:
- The Unlimited Festival (External link) , Chamonix from 4 to 8 April 2018.
- Discover Chamonix (External link)