This may be because the snow isn’t particularly welcoming this weekend, or because what good snow there is has turned to slush by 2pm. It’s more likely down to the techno at Caprices running from noon until 6am every day though, leaving the daytime for sleep before revellers re-join the party.

It’s a culture clash that piques our intrigue; how a classy Swiss ski town well known for it’s summer golfing events became host to a meeting of the superstars of techno, from Seth Troxler to Ricardo Villalobos, Sven Väth, Mathew Jonson, Berghain regulars Marcel Dettman, Ben Klock and more.

“Swiss culture, and especially Swiss ski culture, is far from people going down into an underground club at 8am on a Sunday morning and finding a pack of people who have been down there for the past two days,” admits Mathew Jonson, a revered artist in the scene. No arguments there.

“This is a beautiful, relatively posh resort in Switzerland. If you compare that to Berghain club in Berlin, it really is so different.

He raises a good point. The festival didn’t actually start with a specific focus on the electronic scene.

The first edition of Caprices was in 2004, and until recently, it was centred on rock and pop music. Acts from the past include everyone from Lou Reed and Iggy Pop to Björk, Nas and Nelly Fertado. It was only after what organisers described as an “overwhelming enthusiasm” for the electronic line up that they decided to turn off the lights on their pop past and dedicate themselves to techno in 2014.

“It’s not the most commercial acts in the electronic scene by any means,” Jonson continued. “You don’t have Tiesto or David Guetta here. It’s not that world.

“The people who are playing here are a little more underground. It’s not necessarily an older crowd but it’s a crowd who have had their time exposed to the more commercial side of electronic music, maybe got a little bit bored, dug deeper and found all of us.”

“I actually spent the last five weeks in Japan, in the best powder. Before that I was here a month and a half ago riding, and then a month before that I was in Davos [Switzerland], and all of that was for music. To be able to travel and snowboard and play music, it’s a luxury.”

For Jonson then, the pairing of mountain air and industrial techno music is not only quite natural, it’s the ideal combination.

He’s the only artist at the festival playing live as oppose to DJing with turntables. He explains that this involves ”programming drum machines” as he goes, “mixing them and dubbing them, adding parts, reverb and delay, sculpting the sound with the mixing board and adding new synth lines or basslines on the fly”.

We catch his set from midnight to 1am at Cry d’Er, a mountain chalet 2200m high, and it goes down a treat.

“I’ve never really been that advanced of a snowboarder,” he admits. “I really just like being in the mountains. I’ve always been about nature. I was a lifeguard for seven years and I like camping a lot. It’s relaxing. It’s grounding. And coming here is kind of the same.

“I take it slow; I’m like an old man! I ride for a bit, sit down, look at the view, go have a nice lunch, whatever. It’s super chill.

“And my surroundings influence my music too. When I was living in Vancouver my music had a more organic feel to it than the music I make in Berlin.”

The artists and festival-goers may revel in bringing that organic touch to their industrial scene, but the feeling isn’t always mutual for the residents of Crans-Montana. The festival was forced to move grounds this year after noise complaints in 2016.

We ask our mountain guide François for his opinion on it, and though he admits that the music itself is not for him, he’s positive about the impact it is having on the town and enthusiastic about the future.

He says: “For me, it’s good because people are discovering the place and at the same time they see how beautiful it is, they see the sun and the views, and maybe they will come back again for skiing.”

With the views from Crans-Montana including a 3000m panorama that spans from the Matterhorn to Mont Blanc, there’s certainly no denying that the scenery stays long in the memory.

And judging on a turn out of almost 30,000 people, despite the fact that it was on at the same time as the heavyweight of the snow-based music festival scene Snowbombing, it looks like Caprices will be around for a while as well.

Once a quiet family resort, Crans-Montana is now the latest pilgrimage site in the industrial world of underground techno.

The times are changing in the Swiss mountains.

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