Electrisize Festival

A festival with eight stages, more than 150 acts and 55,000 weekend visits is an unlikely descendant of a party whose organisers once ran out of drinks because twice as many people arrived as expected. That mismatch occurred in 2009, when Michael Frentzen and a group of friends decided to organise an outdoor electronic party around Erkelenz. There was no established festival company behind the idea and barely any advance infrastructure; collaborators were even recruited through StudiVZ. Roughly 200 guests were expected at Lahey-Park, but around 400 to 500 turned up, overwhelming toilets, supplies and the small team. Raphael Meyersieck joined during those formative days, and the core group began turning what could easily have remained a local anecdote into a recurring event. Early Electrisize was restless geographically: it appeared at Schloss Leerodt near Geilenkirchen, experimented indoors at Auditorium, booked Avicii during his early rise and, in 2012, divided itself between Erkelenz’s Franziskanerplatz and Stadthalle. The constant element was less a venue than the belief that electronic music could turn unexpected regional places into temporary gathering points.

Haus Hohenbusch changed that instability in 2013. The former Kreuzherren monastery outside Erkelenz gave Electrisize a permanent home and a visual identity that did not need to be invented by stage designers. Around 3,000 people attended that first Hohenbusch edition, with sixteen DJs including Tujamo and Sick Individuals playing across two stages in the grounds beside the historic manor. The contrast proved durable: old masonry, gardens and agricultural surroundings against fireworks, LED structures and increasingly powerful electronic production. Rather than outgrowing the site and moving to a neutral showground, Electrisize kept redesigning Hohenbusch from within. Today the Mainstage leans toward EDM, house and live acts; Hardsize covers hardstyle, rawstyle and uptempo; Tapuya has moved toward hard techno, hard groove, hard bounce and hard trance; Turbo embraces party classics and Mallorca culture; Valley of Sound offers house, afro house, deep house, soul, funk and disco; The Thunder even creates a rock-pub environment with punk and tribute bands. Those spaces make the modern event far harder to reduce to “EDM” than its early history suggests.

The numbers document how dramatic that transformation has been. Attendance rose to around 8,000 in 2015, 10,000 in 2016, 15,000 in 2017, 20,000 in 2018 and 25,000 for the tenth-anniversary year of 2019. Yet the founders have repeatedly argued that expensive headliners are not the festival’s primary selling point. Production worlds are rebuilt annually, new areas appear, fireworks and visual shows are treated as shared rituals, and the campsite has become part of the identity rather than cheap accommodation beside the gates. Current editions involve three festival days and four camping nights, with regular tents, car camping and motorhome options, improved paths and free showers. Hohenbusch lies beyond central Erkelenz, so arrival requires some planning: parking and Kiss & Ride are managed around the road network, bicycles have dedicated areas, and the organisers discourage simply walking in along busy access roads. Once inside, however, the compact relationship between campsite and festival grounds avoids some of the exhausting distances associated with huge airfield events. That matters when the programme sprawls across more than a hundred performances and Friday and Saturday can continue until 2am.

COVID interrupted the pattern after 2019, but the response revealed how much Electrisize had evolved from a once-a-year production into an organisation with its own local ecosystem. The full 2020 and 2021 festivals were cancelled. Instead, the team created Electricity Campsite, a pandemic-era series of controlled camping weekends with live performances and a circular stage concept. Thousands participated across those summers, and the project received a regional innovation award for its adapted format. It did not replace Electrisize, but it kept organisers, crews, artists and part of the audience connected to Hohenbusch until the main event could return. In 2022 the festival came back with 35,000 visitors, around 120 acts and five stages, and expanded permanently to three official festival days. Sunday also introduced a different age policy, allowing 16- and 17-year-olds to attend because the programme ends before midnight. Growth resumed rapidly: 40,000 in 2023, 45,000 in 2024 and 50,000 in 2025. Each increase required more infrastructure, yet the monastery remained at the centre rather than becoming a nostalgic reference to an abandoned former home.

The 2026 edition, held from 7 to 9 August, set another record with 55,000 visits, more than 150 acts and eight stages. Showtek, Alle Farben, Mesto, Brennan Heart, Ran-D, Coone, Sickmode, Paul Elstak and Gestört aber GeiL sat alongside Eko Fresh, Mia Julia and an increasingly broad range of party and live programming, while Hardsize celebrated a decade as a festival-within-the-festival for harder electronic music. The eighteenth edition is already confirmed for 6–8 August 2027, again accompanied by four camping nights. Electrisize now belongs to a scale that the group standing in Lahey-Park in 2009 could hardly have planned for, but its most important decision may still be the one made in 2013: staying. The stages change design, musical fashions shift and whole new audience groups arrive, yet every August the same former monastery has to be transformed again. Growth has made Electrisize much less like a party among friends, but remaining in Erkelenz has kept it from becoming a festival that could simply be unpacked anywhere.