Hors Pistes Festival

Avant-garde music goes off the beaten track

Created in 2011 by Le Brise Glace, Annecy's contemporary music venue, the Hors Pistes Festival lives up to its name: it breaks out of the concert hall walls to take over the city's most unexpected locations. Deconsecrated chapels, museums, media libraries, concert cafes, art galleries, former prisons, nature reserves, and even ephemeral structures set up on the shores of Lake Annecy — each edition transforms a dozen venues into concert stages where emerging artists and established names from the independent scene cross paths.

A unique winter festival

In the heart of February, while the nearby ski resorts are in full swing, Hors Pistes offers a week of musical adventures in the city center. The festival programs around twenty concerts spread over six days, more than half of which are free. The programming refuses to be confined to any genre: indie rock, folk, electro, post-punk, French chanson, world music, cold wave, psyché — each edition is an invitation to discovery and the unexpected.

Among the artists who have marked recent editions: Shannon Wright, Herman Dune, Souleance, Yan Wagner, Alma Rechtman, Francis of Delirium, Mauve, Raoul Vignal. The festival makes it a point of honor to program rising artists alongside more established names on the independent scene.

Iconic Annecy locations

The two flagship venues of the festival are the Chapelle des Forges in Cran-Gevrier, a former place of worship converted into a concert hall with remarkable acoustics, and L'Étoile Rouge, an ephemeral structure set up on Quai de la Tournette on the shores of Lake Annecy. The festival also takes over the Château d'Annecy, the Médiathèque Bonlieu, the Conservatoire, the Auditorium de Seynod, the cinema La Turbine, the Îlot-S (CAUE), and various concert cafes in the city center.

A traveling bus, the Hors Pistes bus (or Ticket To Jam), offers free mini-concerts during the day, creating spontaneous moments of musical discovery in public spaces.

Le Brise Glace, driving force of Annecy's music scene

The festival is driven by the association Musiques Amplifiées, which manages Le Brise Glace, a contemporary music venue labeled SMAC, located at 54 bis rue des Marquisats in Annecy. Since 2011, the Le Brise Glace team — including Myrtille Pueo, Louise-Marie Simon, and Fanny Guignard — has been designing and organizing the festival with the support of the City of Annecy, the Department of Haute-Savoie, the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes Region, the Ministry of Culture, the CNM (Centre National de la Musique), and SACEM.